A.I. Is Coming to Your Fortune Cookies
Finding a clever and insightful message inside the fortune cookie is always a delightful experience, especially when you are having Chinese cuisine in the United States. While for decades, human writers have been coming up with witty sayings, mysterious messages, and insightful phrases for the fortune cookies, now some of those fortunes are being penned by artificial intelligence, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
OpenFortune, a fortune-writing company in New York, produces and distributes branded fortune cookies to over 47,000 restaurants worldwide. Recently, they started using ChatGPT, an A.I.-powered chatbot for generating their fortune cookie messages. ChatGPT is created by OpenAI and it’s a chatbot that can generate a response to user prompts or questions. While the outputs of the tool may not always make total sense, for fortunes that are supposed to be cryptic by nature, it only adds to the excitement. OpenFortune came up with a five-step process that makes ChatGPT useful for writing fortunes.
ChatGPT’s phrases are ready for use after going through a text parsing, prompt writing, emotional intelligence, prompt refining, and editing process. The A.I.-powered platform writes nuggets of wisdom that are ten times faster than humans, and this ensures the probability of customers receiving the same message is significantly lower, providing a more personalized fortune cookie experience.
Despite using A.I., OpenFortune still retains human copywriters to write prompts to generate messages. By doing so, they ensure that the future of fortune cookie messaging produces an effectively unlimited variation of fortunes.
While ChatGPT's success in writing fortunes is undeniable, some fortune cookie companies believe the personal touch that humans provide far outweighs the potential benefits of using A.I. Kevin Chan, a co-owner of San Francisco's Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, believes that fortune cookies are a form of meditation and a human touch is essential to this experience.
However, with chatbots like ChatGPT infiltrating every industry, they are capable of tasks such as composing school assignments, writing recipes, planning vacations, and even passing the bar exam. It seems that using A.I. to come up with fortunes is a natural progression.
As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, A.I. is coming to fortune cookies near you. With technology advancing at a rapid pace, it is safe to assume that we will see more industries embracing the power of A.I. in the coming years.
