Couple denies using ChatGPT for wedding ceremony after court annuls marriage
The man and woman who found out on Wednesday that their marriage had been declared invalid by the court blame the municipality of Zwolle for the fact that their officiant’s speech did not comply with the law. The wedding ceremony was not written by ChatGPT as the court ruling states, and the municipal official who supervised should have intervened, the couple anonymously told RTL Nieuws on Thursday.
The wedding took place on April 19th in Zwolle. The couple asked a good friend to officiate their wedding, and asked him to keep the wedding light-hearted. He became a “one-day registrar” for the occasion. The wedding went off without a hitch, but the municipality later informed the couple that their wedding ceremony did not meet the legal standards.
The Civil Code states that a marriage is official when “the future spouses (...) declare that they accept each other as husband and wife and that they will faithfully fulfill all duties imposed by the law on the material side.” The friend’s speech did not quite do that.
According to the couple, one of the guests raised the alarm after the ceremony with the municipal registrar, who was present to supervise. “We heard afterward that she asked the municipal registrar if this was correct. Whether it wouldn’t be better to repeat the ‘I do’ at the cake cutting. That should have happened, of course, but the registrar said it was fine. Three months later, after our honeymoon, the municipality called to say that the wedding ceremony hadn’t been fine after all.”
The couple also wanted to explicitly correct something in the court ruling. According to them, the ruling incorrectly states that their friend wrote their wedding ceremony with ChatGPT. “That’s incorrect. He did, however, ask [the AI chatbot] whether his text was legally valid.”
The municipality of Zwolle confirmed to RTL Nieuws that the municipal registrar decided that intervention was unnecessary at the time of the ceremony. According to the municipality, the error was discovered when a civil registry official listened to the audio recording of the ceremony and discovered that the legal text was missing. “The municipality is obligated to then involve the public prosecutor. The public prosecutor subsequently requested the court to have the marriage certificate struck off,” a spokesperson said.
The couple has since officially remarried. “It’s a shame it happened this way. Almost a year has passed, and we’re still dealing with it. Hopefully, in a few years, we’ll be laughing about this,” they told RTL.
