Long before AI chatbots, there was the Oracle of Delphi: a priestess named the Pythia who sat atop a tripod at the Temple of Apollo, inhaling vapors that seeped from the earth and muttering cryptic visions. For nearly a thousand years, rulers, warriors, and wanderers climbed Mount Parnassus to ask her the future. She never gave straight answers. She gave riddles that bent to the ear of the listener.
What made her dangerous wasn’t her accuracy — it was her ambiguity. Croesus asked if he should attack Persia. She replied: “If you go to war, you will destroy a great empire.” He did. He lost his own. The Oracle didn’t lie. She just didn’t say whose empire. In this way, she was both prophet and mirror — a voice that revealed more about the questioner than the gods.
Today she stands as a reminder: every civilization has its Delphic machine, spitting out riddles that sound like truth. Back then it was divine fumes; now it’s statistical language models. The question is the same: do you trust the oracle, or do you hear only yourself in her smoke?