I’ve been following ChatGPT ever since the AI chatbot went viral in late 2022. I started using it shortly after, and it wasn’t long before I became a ChatGPT Plus subscriber. I’ve been covering it along the way, explaining its new features and telling you how you might want to use them to speed up personal or work tasks.
From the get-go, I told you that you can’t trust everything the AI says. Always ask for proof and check sources. It’s not just ChatGPT that hallucinates, which means making up information. Other AI models do it, too. What’s more, recent OpenAI research shows that its most advanced ChatGPT models tend to hallucinate even more than previous versions, underscoring the need to verify the information the AI gives you.
I’m repeating that because I just found the dumbest use of ChatGPT AI yet, which only reinforces my point: You need to learn exactly what genAI products like ChatGPT can do for you and then verify that what they tell you is factually correct, before actually playing with them.
So what’s the dumbest use of ChatGPT yet? A woman from Greece reportedly used ChatGPT to perform coffee grounds reading on pictures of coffee cups. The AI told her that her husband was either going to have an affair with another woman or that he was having one. The woman filed for divorce, convinced that what ChatGPT had told her was true.
The couple was married for 12 years and had two children, per GreekCityTimes, when she asked the AI to interpret the coffee grounds in photos of her and her husband’s cups.
ChatGPT looked at the image of the coffee cup belonging to her husband and told her that a mysterious woman with the initial “E” was the subject of her husband’s fantasies. He was destined to have a relationship with her. The AI also looked at the wife’s cup and offered an even darker interpretation. The husband was already engaged in an affair with a woman who wanted to destroy their home.
“She’s often into trendy things,” the man told the Greek morning show To Proino. “One day, she made us Greek coffee and thought it would be fun to take pictures of the cups and have ChatGPT ‘read’ them.”
“I laughed it off as nonsense,” he added. “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 realized this wasn’t just a phase.”
He refused to agree to a mutual separation, so the woman served him divorce papers only three days later.
Apparently, the woman is into the supernatural. Well before using the AI to read coffee grounds, she visited an astrologer. Her husband said it took her a year to accept that none of what that person told her was real.
Assuming for a second that I believe in coffee, palm, or card readings, I’d still warn anyone that the AI can’t objectively do that. It doesn’t have the skills of supposedly gifted humans who know how to. That’s what coffee readers have also said, the report notes. It’s not just about looking at the grounds in the coffee cup. You have to analyze the foam and the coffee saucer.
But I don’t believe in any of that, let alone AI like ChatGPT trying to make heads or tails of anything.
Again, this is the silliest use of ChatGPT I’ve encountered, but we’re probably only starting to see crazy stuff coming from real users. It also sounds like the kind of story ChatGPT would invent.
Either the woman wanted a divorce, and didn’t have the grounds (pun intended), or she needs to learn how ChatGPT can do, which involves verifying its claims. Hiring a private detective instead of a divorce lawyer could help in this case.
I’m kind of curious how this story ends. I’m not saying the man didn’t cheat or plan to do it with that “E” woman. And how wild would it be if he actually did? I would definitely watch the Netflix TV show based on this crazy ChatGPT story.
The man’s lawyer said that claims made by an AI chatbot have no legal standing in court, and I’m not even sure that needed to be said, especially in this case. Still, the lawyer said the man is “innocent until proven otherwise.”
Imagine the woman’s lawyer trying to argue in court that the AI looked at coffee grounds in two coffee cups and concluded the husband was about to start an affair, or was involved in one. I would want to watch that live.
