- A Greek couple thought it would be fun to use chatgpt as a fortune teller and make “read” coffee in their cups
- Chatgpt said that the husband was cheating with someone whose name begins with E
- The wife is now requesting the divorce on the AI Tasseography response
A woman in Greece is divorcing her husband after Chatgpt played fortune teller and said that her husband was cheating her. According to a Greek report by City Times, the couple asked the Chatbot AI to look at a photo of the land that remained in the cup of Greek coffee of her husband and practice of tasseography, the ancient art of guessing current secrets or future destinations based on patterns that remain in tea or coffee leaves.
After looking at the residue at the bottom of its glasses, Chatgpt had some surprisingly specific things to say. According to the report, the AI said to see that the husband was secretly fantasizing about a woman whose name began with an “E” and was destined to start an adventure with her. In case that was not enough, Chatgpt’s response to Women’s Cup itself was to affirm that the matter had already begun.
Some people take fortune seriously, but generally only humans who practice divination. But what the husband saw as a peculiar and fun moment, his wife saw how a serious and precise description of reality. She told her husband to leave, announced to her children that she was finishing her marriage and served her with legal documents three days later.
Oracular
As a legal issue, it is difficult to say how a judge will see this. There is no real precedent to cite a “robot oracle” as evidence of infidelity in a court of justice anywhere (although there is one about declaring that a house is persecuted before selling it in the state of New York). But the fascinating thing is not so much legalities as what it says about culture.
Tasseography is not a novelty party trick; He is thousands of years and practices through coffee and tea cultures from Türkiye to China and beyond. The idea that symbols and swirls in a cup could reveal their destiny is a perfect example of how people see stories in randomness, be it a constellation or coffee residue.
That some people want to outsource mystical rituals to AI feel almost predetermined. This informed Greek marriage struggle is possibly a good reason not to do so, or at least not calling it wisdom. And it’s not as if Chatgpt really knows how to read coffee. He was not trained in tasseography. What it can do is make educated conjectures based on the patterns you see in an image and what people have said about similar forms or symbols on the Internet. In other words, invent things in a convincing tone, as a human would.
It turns out that a convincing tone is all that is needed for some people. And it’s not like this is the first instance. Tarot reading with chatgpt was an early demonstration of how flexible it could be AI in its activities. The same goes for making astrology and palm reading graphics. But if it stops treating it as entertainment and as a real psychic response, it can cause real emotional damage.
On the other hand, if your spouse is willing to believe that a chatbot of ia claims psychic powers about its own contradictions, the problem might not be about technology. So go ahead and ask chatgpt to read your coffee if you want to laugh. But maybe you don’t act as if you were in a mashup of Black mirror meeting My great Gorda Gorda Wedding And run through the door. Sometimes your coffee is only coffee. And the swirl at the bottom of the cup is not the ghost of a digital Cassandra.
