ChatGPT and its “colleagues” can answer a variety of questions, but they have yet to turn some Chinese lottery buyers into millionaires. In a post that has been gaining traction on the social media platform Xiaohongshu, user Gu Xiangnan from Anhui shared his experience buying lottery tickets using Google’s Gemini-Pro chatbot.

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A lottery shop in Beijing, China. (Photo: SCMP)

First, she fed the chatbot two years of data from Super Lotto, one of China’s most popular lotteries. Super Lotto requires users to pick five numbers from a set of 35 balls and two bonus numbers from another set of 12 balls. Of the five combinations Gemini selected, two contained two winning numbers, and one contained a correct bonus number. But that wasn’t enough for Gu to win the lottery.

Gu said she had previously spent 20 yuan betting on Union Lotto in a similar way and won 5 yuan. “Even if it was just for fun, it was worth considering,” she said.

Lotteries are random, so picking the right number from millions of combinations is all about luck. While sophisticated AI algorithms have no particular advantage over humans when it comes to predicting lucky numbers, that hasn’t stopped more and more people from using the technology to increase their chances.

More than 5,000 people liked Gu’s post, with some commenting that they had also won small amounts of money by using AI to pick numbers. Gemini-Pro and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are not officially available in China, but can be accessed via a virtual private network.

The country's lottery revenue last year reached about 600 billion yuan. It is estimated that nearly 200 million people buy lottery tickets each year.

People in other parts of the world are also turning to generative AI to try their luck. In April 2023, Patthawikorn Boonrin, a resident of Thailand, claimed on TikTok that he had won 2,000 baht using ChatGPT. A month later, Singaporean Aaron Tan won $40 from the same numbers suggested by ChatGPT, according to news portal Yahoo. Also that month, Rohith Teja, a data scientist in France, bought a €2.50 lottery ticket based on random numbers generated by ChatGPT and won €6. However, another ticket he bought did not have any correct numbers.

“The lottery is a completely random game, and cannot be predicted by any model,” he concluded on his blog.

In Gu’s case, Gemini explained that it was trying to predict winning results by picking the most winning numbers in the past. Not only that, the chatbot even gave Gu some advice: “Treat the lottery as a form of entertainment, not as a way to invest or make money. Good luck.”

(According to SCMP)