The Cookie
Can AI predict the future? A giant, AI-powered fortune cookie in the Adelaide Central Market that dispensed fortunes written by an eccentric GPT-3.
The Cookie was created for the City of Adelaide’s Createch City Challenge, built around a simple provocation: can AI predict the future? Installed in the bustling Adelaide Central Markets, the oversized fortune cookie became an unlikely oracle for thousands of shoppers.
Visitors asked a question via a custom web app, then watched their fate unspool across a curved, paper-shaped LED screen. The Cookie’s responses were often poetic, sometimes nonsensical, and occasionally uncomfortably accurate.
The Technology
The Cookie was powered by an open-source language model (GPT-3). We trained it to adopt a distinctive tone of voice — somewhere between a fortune teller and a sarcastic teenager — producing a steady stream of predictions that felt both whimsical and strangely pointed.
The project launched just as the public was becoming aware of ChatGPT, giving many visitors their first encounter with large language models in a way that felt timely, disarming, and delightfully odd.
A Full-Circle Moment
The Cookie also built on experiments we began in 2018 with Google Creative Lab using GPT-2. Returning to the idea several years later, with far more capable tools, felt like a fitting full-circle moment in our ongoing exploration of human-machine collaboration.