{‘It reveals such a lack of effort’: why I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT|The AI Romantic Dealbreaker: The Reasons I Won’t Date a ChatGPT User.

It was a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this person described using artificial intelligence for the early stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have usual relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my social media and party conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my disdain.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What 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 ‘Ick’ to Political Stance.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that lacked any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly simple tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious moral act. We are aware that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; isolated, disconnected people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech executives in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the collective damage it creates?

How AI Ruins Romance and Connection.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “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 dating criterion actually fits with your life objectives.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “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 inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

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

More Individuals Voicing ChatGPT Apprehensions.

The aversion for AI applies beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about going into 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 “demonstrates 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 recently had a messy breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to sit through any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I could not manage it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for the routine work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is likewise skeptical. “I don’t know 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.”

Public Personalities and Tech Professionals Speaking Out.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using AI garnered significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning 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 critical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer working 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|