The Fortune Robot

What better way to add surprise than adding human unpredictability? The Fortune Robot is a wall-mounted drawing machine that reveals your fate—if you dare press its button. Over 2-3 minutes, the dangling pen writes your future letter by letter in near-perfect handwriting.

The technology is simple: a repurposed 3D printer board loaded with site-specific ChatGPT fortunes—whimsical, absurd, and surreal. It has predicted the fate of hundreds at Galerie Graf, the TedAI Conference, and Artificial Territories in Vienna.

The Fortune Robot demonstrates the ELIZA effect: our tendency to project meaning onto machines. People know it’s a trick, yet they co-create meaning through their own projections, making the robot a catalyst for storytelling.