{‘It shows such a lack of effort’: the reasons I refuse to go out with someone who relies on ChatGPT|The AI Dating Dealbreaker: The Reasons I Won’t Go Out With a ChatGPT User.

The setting could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled tightly as this man explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I replied politely. Internally, though, I resolved: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Dealbreakers: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Many individuals have standard romantic non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist people? What if I only use it as a proofreading tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I respond: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From Disgust to Political Position.

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

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the program even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; isolated, detached people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the collective negative impact it causes?

The Dating Disaster: When Your Date Relies on ChatGPT.

It seems ChatGPT has found a way to make the romantic scene even more challenging. A good friend lately told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to picture myself establishing a meaningful bond with a person who often uses a tool that erodes concentration and might lead to societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

Reflect on whether your relationship preference genuinely fits with your life aims.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an evangelist. 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 generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT users was too harsh. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

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

Others Who Share the ChatGPT Aversion.

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 dreams 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 disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you are unable to 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 notoriously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I was unable to do it by myself. I was too dependent on AI to do the simplest things [at work].

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

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

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

This attitude is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, comparable slop on Instagram. Sources indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals won’t use AI to write their code.

{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer based in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he eagerly used AI in the past to write or enhance his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|