The project serves as a fusion of vintage arcade aesthetics and contemporary technology. When someone inserts a quarter into the classic arcade coin slot, the machine comes to life, utilizing AI to craft a personalized fortune that's printed on the spot via a thermal printer.
Beyond its entertainment value, this creation subtly critiques the modern-day reliance on technology for answers, mirroring our societal tendency to look to digital oracles for guidance on the unknown.
It reflects on the growing intersection between technology and mysticism, questioning our readiness to accept machine-generated insights as truths and pondering the implications of outsourcing human curiosity to algorithms.
Using Arduinos and an arcade-stye coin slot I created a fortune telling machine that dispenses fortunes created by ChatGPT.
Tools: Arduino Uno, laser cutting, thermal printers
Timeframe: 6 weeks
Once I had 50+ useable fortunes I had to manually enter them into my code so that a random fortune was selected every time a coin was inserted into the slot.
Testing, interations and troubleshooting
I had over 75 conversations with ChatGPT to try to encourage it to generate fortunes that were funny, self-aware and short enough to be printed as a fortune.
