The Way the Cookie Crumbles

Three cheers for Kevin Chan. Three jeers for Charles Li.

“Careful thinking will command respect,” read the fortune cookie I opened after dinner last night at a Chinese restaurant. It was a nice thought so I kept it. Turns out I may have preserved one of the last fortunes to be written by an actual human.

Today’s WSJ A-Hed column by Angus Loten reports on a looming split in the fortune cookie industry between traditionalists like Kevin Chan who keep writing their own copy, and feckless cheapos like Charles Li who have handed the responsibility over to ChatGPT.

What food-related tasks will be next? Can ChatGPT create a potable new cocktail? Optimize the ingredients in a Midwestern church-basement jello mold? Recommend a spice blend for a Thai-inflected poutine?

More fundamentally, can an AI plausibly discuss matters of flavor and fragrance? I don’t have the bandwidth to pursue this experimentally—maybe some readers will follow up and let us know the results.