Medium: Fortune Cookies, GPT2, metalic stickers

Whatever the fortune cookie’s origin is, we can all agree that it is a tasty simulacrum of the next level. Not only because it has been copied, optimised, influenced multiple times and presented to the western world as its own reality but also because of the small piece of text that it carries within.

The small piece of paper is its own reality, full of bite-sized wisdom quotes and advice for a better fortune. These quotes are most of the time simulacra themselves, most of the time copied and pasted from the web by people that are not even able to read the language they are written in. In my case, the small advice is not written by humans but it was produced by an AI algorithm, namely GPT2.

The AI was still trained on human-written literature but the generated texts completely lose their origins and become realities themselves.

This work is a metaphor of what Artificial Intelligence is bound to become in the future, a Simulacrum of the next magnitude where the lost original is humans. The name of this work is Murca Lumis which is an anagram for Simulacrum.