A bizarre twist of events has emerged from Greece, where a woman’s trust in artificial intelligence has reportedly led to the collapse of her 12-year marriage.
The mother-of-two, whose name has been withheld, allegedly relied on a chatbot’s fortune-telling interpretation of her husband’s coffee cup to accuse him of infidelity.
The odd episode, first reported by a Greek publication and cited by the Daily Mail, involved the woman asking the AI chatbot to analyze the remnants at the bottom of her husband’s coffee cup, a method tied to tasseography, or tasseomancy, a traditional fortune-telling practice.
Typically reserved for human fortune-tellers, the practice interprets patterns in coffee grounds, tea leaves, or wine sediments to predict the future.
Defying convention, the woman turned to the AI instead of a mystic, uploading a photo of the coffee cup’s bottom and requesting a digital “reading.”
What followed was an alleged response that changed the course of her marriage.
The husband, appearing on the Greek morning show To Proino, expressed disbelief. “A few years ago, she visited an astrologer and it took her a whole year to accept that none of it was real,” he recalled.
But the digital “prophecy” she received seemed to convince her. According to reports, after submitting photos of both her and her husband’s coffee cups to the chatbot, the woman was told her husband was contemplating an affair, with someone whose name started with the letter “E.”
The AI bot allegedly didn’t stop there. It reportedly claimed he was already unfaithful, and that the supposed “other woman” was determined to destroy their marriage.
“I laughed it off as nonsense, but she took it seriously,” the husband said on To Proino. “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.”
Although the husband declined to proceed with a mutual separation initially, he was formally served with divorce papers just three days later.
He is now contesting the divorce, with his legal team arguing that AI-based accusations have no legal merit and insisting he is “innocent until proven otherwise.”
The surreal story quickly went viral on Reddit, where it sparked a mix of humor and concern. One user quipped, “They are taking out psychic jobs!” to which another responded, “To be fair, they saw this coming.”
Another commenter cautioned that while AI has made significant strides, it’s still prone to inaccuracies.
“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 shared. “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 somber note, one Reddit user expressed concern about the growing difficulty some individuals face in distinguishing between AI-generated content and reality.
“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.”
