One of the many joys of eating Chinese food in the U.S. is breaking open a perfectly crispy, slightly sweet cookie and reading the clever message printed on the tiny slip of paper inside. Now, some of those fortunes are being penned by artificial intelligence. For decades, the companies that produce fortune cookies have leaned on human writers to come up with witty sayings, insightful phrases, and mysterious messages that appear inside each cookie. However, even for the most creative humans, coming up with fortunes isn’t an easy feat. Writers spend hours trying to craft the perfect text, and since manufacturers around the world churn out roughly 3 billion fortune cookies a year, the demand for unique, inventive fortunes is high. Now, some fortune cookie makers are turning to technology to make the process a little easier. New York-based OpenFortune, which produces and distributes fortune cookies to more than 47,000 restaurants, recently began using ChatGPT to come up with its phrases. Users can enter prompts or questions and ChatGPT will spit out a response. The tool’s outputs don’t always make total sense, but for fortunes — which are cryptic by nature — that only adds to the mystique. Despite ChatGPT’s prowess for writing fortunes, the company has retained its human copywriters. Now, however, their jobs include writing prompts to make the chat-bot come up with messages.
