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 [File this under "News of the Weird" -- Mike]

She let ChatGPT read her coffee grounds  then filed for divorce

Date:
Thu, 15 May 2025 21:00:00 +0000

Description:
A Greek woman ended her marriage after ChatGPT interpreted coffee grounds to
say her husband was unfaithful.

FULL STORY

A woman in Greece is divorcing her husband after ChatGPT played fortune 
teller and claimed her husband was cheating on her. According to a Greek City
Times report , the couple asked the AI chatbot to look at a photo of the
grounds left behind in her husband's cup of Greek coffee and practice
tasseography, the ancient art of divining present secrets or future fates
based on patterns left behind in tea leaves or coffee. 

After looking at the residue at the bottom of their cups, ChatGPT had some
shockingly specific things to say. According to the report, the AI claimed to
see that the husband was secretly fantasizing about a woman whose name 
started with an E and was fated to begin an affair with her. In case that
wasn't enough, ChatGPT's response to the womans own cup was to claim that the
affair had already started. 

Some people take fortune-telling seriously, but usually only from humans
practicing divination. But what the husband saw as a quirky, funny moment, 
his wife saw as a serious and accurate description of reality. She told her
husband to leave, announced to her children that she was ending her marriage,
and served him with legal papers three days later.

Oracular AI 

As a legal matter, it's hard to say how a judge will view this. There's no
real precedent for citing a robot oracle as evidence of infidelity in a court
of law anywhere (though there is one about declaring a house is haunted 
before you sell it in New York State). But whats fascinating isnt the
legalities so much as what it says about culture. 

Tasseography isnt some novelty party trick; it's thousands of years old and
practiced across coffee and tea-drinking cultures from Turkey to China and
beyond. The idea that symbols and swirls in a cup could reveal your fate is a
perfect example of how people see stories in randomness, whether a
constellation or coffee residue. 

That some people want to outsource mystic rituals to AI feels almost
predetermined. This reported Greek marital strife is arguably a good reason
not to do so, or at least not to call it wisdom. And it's not like ChatGPT
actually knows how to read coffee grounds. It wasnt trained on tasseography.
What it can do is make educated guesses based on the patterns it sees in an
image and what people have said about similar shapes or symbols on the
internet. In other words, making stuff up in a convincing tone, just like a
human would. 

It turns out that a convincing tone is all it takes for some people. And it's
not like this is the first instance. Tarot card reading with ChatGPT was an
early demonstration of how flexible the AI could be in its activities. The
same goes for making astrology charts and palm reading. But if you stop
treating it like entertainment and like a real psychic answer, it can cause
real emotional damage. 

Then again, if your spouse is willing to believe an AI chatbot claiming
psychic powers over your own contradictions, the issue might not be about the
technology. So go ahead and ask ChatGPT to read your coffee grounds if you
want a laugh. But maybe don't act like you're in a mashup of Black Mirror
meets My Big Fat Greek Wedding and run out the door. Sometimes, your coffee 
is just coffee. And the swirl at the bottom of the cup is not the ghost of a
digital Cassandra.

======================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/she-let-chatgpt-re
ad-her-coffee-grounds-then-filed-for-divorce

$$
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