Eilidh, 30, was chatting to a guy on a dating app and things were going well. He was cute. Definitely her usual type. They’d arranged a date and she was looking forward to it. But then she spotted something she hadn’t previously. On his profile, he referenced using ChatGPT to write his bio. “I immediately unmatched,” she says. “If someone’s not able to even think for themselves, there’s no chance they’re going to be thoughtful when it comes to you. It’s also such a red flag for people to not care about the impact that generative AI has on the planet.”. She’s far from the only one. As ChatGPT and similar technologies gradually infiltrate our everyday lives, people appear to be divided into two camps: those who lean on it for everything from “creative” ideas to break-up texts, and those who consider such over-reliance a massive turn-off. “Last summer, I struck up a conversation with a guy in a cafe who I thought was cute,” Nilu, 35, says. “Within five minutes, he told me that he was using ChatGPT to help him ‘understand how to speak to Italians’. Like, congratulations, you are a moron. I excused myself shortly after.”. After speaking to various people for this piece, certain patterns began to emerge. Daters thought that using ChatGPT for tasks that the human brain could do on its own—hash over an argument, decide what to wear—revealed a fundamental weakness in character; hardly an attractive quality. Stephanie, 36, told Vogue she believed it signalled emotional immaturity and a “lack of leadership”. “It feels as if the person is trying to cheat their way out of doing the work. If they’re using it to give them advice on how to feel, how to react, these kinds of things… I’m of the idea that, as humans, we need to figure life out manually. We shouldn’t be relying on AI to tell us what to do, how to think.”. It’s not just prospective daters that are turned off by AI use; it’s become an ick-inducing issue within committed relationships, too. One woman who wished to remain anonymous told me that her boyfriend had become “addicted” to it. “It concerns me that if we were to argue, he’d be asking Chat what he should do and how to defuse the argument… he also uses it to find the answer to simple questions like ‘how to make a spicy margarita’ and it gives me the ick.” Others professed that they’d felt disillusioned within long-standing friendships for similar reasons. “I learned he even tells ChatGPT when he has a shit and it tells him if he’s above average for that month,” one man reveals, astonished.. Everyone I spoke to denounced the idea that asking AI to complete the most basic of tasks is worth its monstrous environmental impact, which is well-publicised—one study published in the journal Patterns estimates that AI’s water use is similar to the global consumption of bottled water. For many, being unconcerned with AI’s impact on the planet is enough of an ick in i
