14-05-2025
Woman 'files for divorce' after ChatGPT 'predicted' her husband was cheating on her by 'reading' coffee grounds in his cup
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT are increasingly becoming a part of everyday life, not just for help at work or school.
But one woman reportedly had a bit too much trust in ChatGPT's abilities to divine her husband's activities when he isn't with her.
According to a Greek publication, the unnamed mother-of-two, who has been married to her husband for 12 years, asked the chatbot to analyse the remnants of her husband's coffee cup and give her a 'reading'.
As odd as it sounds, reading the dregs at the bottom of a cup is a fortune-telling method known as tasseography or tasseomancy.
It involves interpreting patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments to discern the future, and is usually done by those who claim to be fortune tellers - not ChatGPT.
But this woman's decision to test the divine with the digital led to a spectacular breakdown in her marriage after ChatGPT allegedly suggested her husband was having an affair.
Greek City Times reported that she uploaded a photograph of the bottom of her husband's coffee cup, which prompted a rather unexpected response for both parties.
The husband, who reportedly appeared on Greek morning show To Proino to talk about his side of the story, said it wasn't the first time his wife let herself be guided by the supernatural.
'A few years ago, she visited an astrologer and it took her a whole year to accept that none of it was real,' he told the morning show.
But the reading she received from ChatGPT appeared to influence her entirely.
After she uploaded photos of her and her husband's coffee cups into the AI chatbot, she was allegedly told that her partner was thinking about starting an extramarital affair with a woman whose name began with the letter E.
ChatGPT allegedly went even further with the reading and apparently interpreted the coffee grounds to suggest that he was already cheating on her and the 'other woman' had plans to tear their marriage apart.
Speaking on To Proino, the husband said: 'I laughed it off as nonsense but she took it seriously.
'She asked me to leave, told our kids we were getting divorced, and then I got a call from a lawyer. That's when I realised this wasn't just a phase.'
He refused to agree to a mutual separation, according to the publication - but only three days later, he was formally served with divorce papers.
He is reportedly pushing back against his wife's divorce attempts, with his lawyer arguing that the claims made by ChatGPT have no legal standing and that he is 'innocent until proven otherwise'.
Many people have responded to the bizarre story on Reddit, with some people joking that AI is now stealing a new genre of work.
'They are taking out psychic jobs!' one person wrote, to which another replied with a pun: 'To be fair, they saw this coming.'
A third pointed out that, while developments in AI have been impressive, the technology is flawed and can come up with some 'extremely stupid' results at times.
'I was running a bunch of things through ChatGPT to get some quick examples set up for a statistics course and it insisted that the word 'extraterrestrial' has 15 letters, of which four of them were E's,' they gave as an example.
'No matter how I worded the question it insisted both of these things. Now I can't recreate that, which is even more confusing.'
On a more serious note, one person pointed out that vulnerable people are finding it harder to tell the difference between reality and fiction thanks to tools like AI chatbots.
'I genuinely feel like we're gonna see a huge wave of people for whom LLM (Large Language Model) tools have just utterly annihilated their ability to comprehend reality,' they wrote.
'I'd say it's a technology that needs safeguards but that ship sailed years ago.'
The art of reading coffee grounds and telling fortunes originated from Turkey and can be traced back hundreds of years to the rule of Sultan Suleinan in the 16th century.
Depending on how the coffee grounds settle in the cup, fortune tellers divine different fates - perhaps you've been cursed with the evil eye if the grounds form a lump, or all your wishes will come true if your cup becomes stuck to its saucer.
Fortune tellers also look for patterns and shapes in the grounds to determine if they might represent animals, icons, letters or numbers, which can mean different things.
Reading tea leaves is also a popular alternative. The practice was in high demand in Europe in the 17th century, when the British public was first introduced to tea from China.
This involves brewing loose leaf tea and pouring it into a wide, plain, flat-bottomed cup. Once you've finished enjoying the tea, the leaves are left to form shapes at the bottom of the cup, which fortune tellers claim they can decipher to divine your fate.
