China's lottery players bet on AI chatbots to give winning numbers, but none are millionaires yet

ChatGPT and its peers are known for giving smart answers to a variety of questions, but some internet users in China recently found that lottery numbers generated by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have yet to turn them into millionaires.

In one post that went viral on the Instagram-like platform Xiaohongshu, user Gu Xiangnan from eastern Anhui province shared her experience buying lottery tickets using numbers generated by Google's Gemini-Pro.

She first fed the chatbot with two years' worth of historical data from Super Lotto, one of the most popular of its kind in China that asks players to select five numbers from a set of 35 balls and two bonus numbers from another set of 12 balls.

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Among the five combinations picked by Gemini, two of them each contained two winning numbers, while another two each had one correct bonus number. Gu won no money.

Gu also said she previously spent 20 yuan (US$2.8) betting on Union Lotto, another popular lottery in China, using the same approach, winning 5 yuan in total.

"Although it was just for fun, there is something worth looking into," she said.

Lotteries are designed to be random, meaning that picking the right numbers from millions of possible combinations depends entirely on luck. While sophisticated AI algorithms have no particular edge over humans when it comes to predicting lucky numbers, it has not stopped people from using AI to try to boost their chances.

The Xiaohongshu post was liked by more than 5,000 users, with some commenting that they also won small sums using numbers suggested by generative AI. Gemini-Pro and OpenAI's ChatGPT are officially unavailable in China, although they can be accessed using a virtual private network.

China, which logged annual lottery sales of around 600 billion yuan last year, is estimated to have nearly 200 million regular buyers of sports and welfare lottery tickets.

People in other parts of the world have also been turning to generative AI for lottery number suggestions.

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

Also in May, Paris-based data scientist Rohith Teja bought a 2.5 euro (US$2.7) lottery ticket using random numbers given by ChatGPT, winning 6 euros. Another ticket that he purchased using numbers generated by ChatGPT through analysing historical data contained no winning numbers at all.

"The lottery is a highly randomised event that cannot be predicted by any predictive model," Teja concluded in his blog.

In the case of Gu, the Xiaohongshu user, Gemini explained to her that it tried to predict lottery results by picking recent lucky numbers that also won more frequently in the past.

While the chatbot said its selection "had a certain degree of randomness as well as a certain degree of regularity", it advised against taking the lottery too seriously.

"Treat lottery as a recreational activity, not a way to invest or make money. Good luck," it said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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