More couples are using AI to write their wedding vows. They just might not admit it.

Last month, Evy and Bijan got married in front of 140 of their nearest and dearest. To give the ceremony a more sentimental touch, the couple came up with their own vows. “Everyone loved our vows and mentioned that it was their favorite part of the wedding,” Evy, who asked to keep her last name private, tells Yahoo. Guests could never have guessed that ChatGPT helped write them.

“We use ChatGPT for everything. We’re both pro-AI, if you will,” the newlywed says about using the popular AI chatbot. But it wasn’t until a week before the wedding that they decided to use ChatGPT to write their deepest declarations of love and commitment to each other. The idea came to them when they were working on a different part of the ceremony with Evy’s brother, who served as the wedding officiant.

“We were writing out the statements that he’d read as the officiant, and I was like, ‘Let’s go to ChatGPT. We have some ideas, but let’s see what it has to say,’” she recalls. “In that process, I thought, I’m probably going to use it to write my vows, and I think that gave my fiancé the green light to do the same.”

She says she and Bijan were on the same page about turning to AI and felt confident that it wouldn’t take away from the authenticity of their vows. Not everybody feels that way. It’s a divisive topic, according to a 2025 survey by the wedding planning website Zola, which found that couples were pretty evenly split over whether or not to get inspiration from AI when writing vows (51% are OK with it, 49% aren’t). The reality is that many are doing it anyway, whether they’d admit to it or not.

AI now pronounce you husband and wife

The role of AI in wedding events and planning has become prominent. Zola reports that 90% of newly married couples are open to using it to manage budgets, find wedding inspiration and create schedules, and 74% are happy to use AI to help craft wedding toasts and speeches. Meanwhile, the 2025 Global Wedding Market Report by Think Splendid, a wedding consulting firm, states that 38% of those surveyed used AI tools for speeches and their own vows.

Steven Greitzer, the founder and CEO of Provenance, a company that’s designed to help couples, officiants, guests and wedding planners create scripts and speeches with AI, attests to its popularity. The service’s Vow Builder tool uses specific prompts to get personalized information about a couple’s relationship and turn those responses into vows. Greitzer emphasizes that the process is only possible with human input. “It is entirely using what you give us, using your truth, your personality and your personal stories,” he tells Yahoo.

Using AI tools can make vows feel more polished and less stressful, Greitzer adds. “Speech writing is a very technical task; it’s a skill set,” he notes. “So if we can help with the technical elements of writing while still helping to make sure that the love that you wish to convey comes out more articulately, then what a gift to give. Even if you are a practiced public speaker or writer, this is still a daunting and intimidating moment — perhaps the most important speech you ever deliver in your life — that you really want to nail.”

The words can then be edited, revised and further personalized as needed. That’s what Evy did with the suggestions ChatGPT provided her. “I had been taking notes whenever I had a thought about my partner. I plugged that into ChatGPT, with prompts [we] came up with,” she says. “It was just being corny at first, and I wanted it to feel more real.”

She asked the bot to show her different options for tone and gravitated toward the version that was reflective and poetic. “I still did a good amount of editing after. ChatGPT is never perfect, and it’s not a substitute for what is from my heart, but I love that it can come back with a more cohesive version of what I had written,” says Evy. “I didn’t end up using any of the versions that it gave me, but I took words and sentences of it. … I probably spent just as much time as I would writing [the vows] myself.”

To tech or not to tech?

Evy isn’t ashamed to have used ChatGPT for her vows, though she does recognize why people might be. “It is kind of creepy to use AI to write your vows,” she admits. “But I’m just using the tools at hand and choosing to see the bright spots in it rather than the dystopian view, which is totally there.” Close friends and family members are aware of how AI was part of her writing process, but she didn’t offer that information to everyone. “There are sometimes prejudgments around AI and how it’s used.”

Conversations about AI’s role in wedding speeches and vows reflect that. “If a computer makes the words you speak at a wedding, what you’re going to get is recycled clichés. You’ll lose the humanity, the moments that make us feel love,” a wedding officiant told the New York Times in 2023.

A recent Reddit discussion on the topic garnered similarly negative comments from users. “Just don’t do it. Something that is supposed to come from the heart and show the human condition seems horribly wrong to get spit out of some ChatGPT hole,” read one comment. “Sickening. Think for yourselves,” wrote another user.

“The stigma is really interesting,” says Greitzer, who has heard the perspective that using this sort of assistance is cheating. “There’s still pride in feeling like you wrote this yourself, and perhaps that is a reason why people are not actively sharing [that they’ve used AI].”

Kendra Lynece, a wedding photographer based in Grand Rapids, Mich., has seen firsthand how many people are getting an assist from AI. “I’ve absolutely seen couples use ChatGPT to write their vows the day of their wedding. I’m talking literal hours before walking down the aisle,” she tells Yahoo. “One groom typed his vows on his phone while still in sweatpants, pacing in the bridal suite hallway. A bride once asked her maid of honor to help make hers sound deep and romantic by feeding her bullet points into ChatGPT.”

She doesn’t see it as a bad thing. “From my view behind the lens, it’s added a fascinating modern twist to wedding prep, and even with the help of AI, those moments still feel raw, heartfelt and real,” says Lynece.

Evy felt that way about her own vows. “I was reading some of the sentences that ChatGPT was writing, trying to speak them out loud to see how they’d sound coming out of my mouth and I was crying,” she says. “It’s still my feelings and my words and my thoughts about [my husband]. They make me cry.”

Her groom’s own AI-assisted sentiments didn’t disappoint either. “I loved his vows. They were amazing,” she says. She adds: “Even though they were aided by AI, [the vows] were so true to us; they came from the heart and were genuine all the same.”