Amidst the booming digital revolution, an intriguing trend has emerged in the Chinese lottery scene. Surprisingly, AI chatbots, which are known for their intelligent and varied responses, are now being used for a new task: predicting lottery results. While this novel approach has stirred up a lot of excitement, it has yet to yield any real financial results for players.

This story is illustrated by Gu Xiangnan from Anhui Province, China. Her experience involved buying lottery tickets using numbers generated by Google’s Gemini-Pro AI chatbot, which was in fact an AI chatbot that she had fed two years of historical data from Super Lotto (the most popular lottery in China, which requires players to pick five numbers from a set of 35 balls).

Despite the efforts of the Gemini-Pro model, Gu Xiangnan’s experiment did not yield any financial success when she played the lottery. This trend is not limited to Gu Xiangnan’s experience, but has also attracted the attention of China’s lottery enthusiasts, a group of nearly 200 million people who contribute to the country’s annual lottery revenue of about 600 billion yuan.

The rise of AI in lottery number selection is also evident in other parts of the world. From Thailand to Singapore, stories of modest wins using AI-generated numbers have emerged, sparking curiosity and hope.

In April 2023, a Thai man named Patthawikorn Boonrin claimed on TikTok that he had won 2,000 baht ($56) using ChatGPT, according to digital media outlet Mashable. A month later, a Singaporean man named Aaron Tan won a $40 cash prize using numbers generated by ChatGPT, according to news portal Yahoo News.

However, it is important to remember that the lottery is fundamentally a game of chance. AI, for all its sophistication, still cannot have an advantage in predicting accurately in this game of chance. Experts and AI alike recommend that you treat the lottery as a form of entertainment, not an investment strategy.

HUYNH DUNG (Source: Gizmochina/Scmp)