Goa man uses ChatGPT to find lost footwear outside Ujjain temple

PANAJI: A Goa-based man used ChatGPT to resolve every temple visitor’s nightmare: reclaiming their shoes from a sea of footwear.

Shubhang Borkar turned his phone into a scanning device outside the Mahakal Temple in Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain, sharing snapshots of footwear with the chatbot until it flagged his missing pair.

Borkar shared a video of his AI experiment, titled ‘Used ChatGPT to find my lost clogs’, on Instagram four days ago.

The video shows how Borkar, who described himself as a “hacker on weekdays (cybersec), explorer on weekends”, used the AI chatbot to identify his footwear after failing to spot it on the crowded shoe racks outside the temple.

He first shot rows of footwear around him, highlighting how difficult it was to distinguish one pair from another, and then opened ChatGPT and uploaded pictures of his shoes along with a separate image showing what his clogs looked like. Borkar informed the chatbot that he was at the Mahakal temple and had lost his clogs among the footwear left outside, and asked it to scan the footwear and identify his pair.

He sent photographs of different sections of the racks, allowing ChatGPT to analyse them for a possible match. The AI tool finally directed him towards a specific pair. The video shows how an otherwise frustrating search for footwear outside a temple turned into an unusual real-world use of AI.