WTF?! You shouldn't trust generative AI to come up with the right answers all the time – even the tools' own disclaimers warn to check their responses for factual accuracy – and they're certainly not renowned for their ability to read tea leaves. But one woman put so much faith in ChatGPT's divination skills that she divorced her husband of 12 years after it interpreted the remains of his coffee mug as signs of infidelity.
Rather than using ChatGPT's image skills to create Studio Ghibli-style pictures, a Greek woman decided to experiment with the trend of AI tasseography – a form of divination that interprets shapes left by tea leaves (or sometimes coffee grounds or wine sediment) after a cup is drunk.
She uploaded a photo of her husband's Greek coffee grounds and asked the AI to interpret them. The chatbot's interpretation was that the husband was fantasizing about having an affair with a younger woman whose name began with E, and that he was destined to begin a relationship with this person.
The wife also uploaded a photo of the remains of her own coffee grounds. ChatGPT's interpretation was even more damning for the husband: it claimed he was already having an affair with this other woman, and that she was trying to destroy the wife's family.
The woman then did what any other normal person would do – she filed for divorce without telling her husband.
Speaking on the Greek morning show To Proino, the husband said that the wife was often into trendy things and believed getting ChatGPT to read the coffee grounds would be fun.
"I laughed it off as nonsense," he said. "But she didn't. She told me to leave, informed our kids about the divorce, and the next thing I knew, I was getting a call from her lawyer."
The man refused to agree to a mutual separation, naturally, so he was served with divorce papers three days later. His lawyer is pushing the seemingly obvious argument that claims made by an AI have no legal standing, especially when it comes to reading tea leaves.
It seems that the woman has a penchant for believing mystical guidance. "A few years ago, she visited an astrologer and it took a whole year for her to accept that none of it was real," the husband said.
Not only is the whole situation a sad indictment of how much faith some people put in AI (and tasseography), but it's also been pointed out that readings traditionally look at the foam patterns, the swirl, and the saucer – not just the leftover coffee grounds.
Image credit: Kateryna Hliznitsova
Woman divorces husband after ChatGPT reads his coffee grounds and predicts affair
