On January 6th, the District Court of Overijssel, in the Netherlands, invalidated a wedding ceremony held in April of last year in the city of Zwolle. Despite the married couple’s pleas, the Court decided that their marriage had never legally existed because the wording of their wedding speeches, which had been generated by ChatGPT, did not include certain mandatory phrases.
The Dutch couple had appointed a friend to officiate as a temporary civil registrar, known as an eendagsbabs in the Netherlands, and he decided to have ChatGPT generate more romantic and informal speeches for the newlyweds. The bot came up with a more relaxed version of the usual wedding speech, but one that did not include a mandatory declaration.
“Do you promise that today, tomorrow, and all the days to come, you want to stand by [name of the woman]?” the man was asked during the wedding ceremony. “To laugh together, grow together, and love each other no matter what life brings?”
“To continue supporting each other, teasing each other, holding on to each other, even when life gets tough?” the woman was asked.
Under Article 1:67 of the Dutch Civil Code, a marriage is only legally formed when the spouses declare, in the presence of the registrar and their chosen witnesses, that they accept each other as husband and wife and will fulfil all duties attached to the married state by law. Unfortunately, the AI-generated speech included no such declaration.
Upon reviewing the ceremony held in Zwolle in April last year, the municipality noticed the lack of the mandatory declaration from the newlyweds’ speeches and notified the public prosecutor’s office in the Oost-Nederland district, which, in turn, asked that the marriage certificate be removed from the civil registry, because the marriage was illegal.
The couple contested the invalidation of their marriage over something as trivial as wedding vow wording, asking the Court to at least acknowledge April 25th as the year of their wedding, because of the date’s significance to them, but their request was denied. The couple added that an official registrar from the municipality had been present to supervise their wedding ceremony, but had made no complaints at the time.
“The court understands that the marriage date recorded in the certificate is important to the man and the woman, but cannot disregard what is laid down in the law,” the Court said in a statement, adding that no marriage had come into existence between the parties.
