{‘It shows such a laziness’: the reasons I refuse to go out with someone who relies on ChatGPT|The AI Dating Dealbreaker: The Reasons I Refuse to Date a ChatGPT User.

The setting could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned politely as this man explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a professional wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Inside, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Romantic Red Flags: AI Use.

Many individuals have standard relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my news feed and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my scorn.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help people? What if I only use it as a editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I say: there are individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Political Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of revulsion that lacked any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly ethical choice. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a science fiction plot point as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech executives in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the wider damage it causes?

The Romantic Disaster: When Your Date Relies on ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s weakening our shared attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “productivity” means asking an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Reflect on whether your relationship criterion genuinely fits with your long-term objectives.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may use ChatGPT for particular tasks but doesn’t endorse it. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has come her complaining about “chatfishing” or people who use AI to create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT users was too harsh. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your values, and it’s important to find someone whose values are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the AI Ick.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about accessing her phone settings and deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it nearly impossible to opt out. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a laziness”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to sit through any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I found not handle it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for even basic work.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has comparable views. “I am not sure if I would think otherwise about someone who uses ChatGPT, but I would be like, ‘come on,’” he said. “You don’t need to rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Tech Backlash.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use AI tools, it made news. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. The same goes for when Simu Liu, Alison Roman, Céline Dion, Emily Blunt, and others issued statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This sentiment is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, similar content on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies won’t use AI to write their code.

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