AI love you! Moonpig enlists the help of ChatGPT to write personalised Valentine’s Day cards

Not all of us are skilled in the language of love, and when it comes to Valentine’s Day, there is all the more pressure to find the right words to express how we feel.

Fear not, as artificial intelligence (AI) is here to turn your greetings card into a work of Shakespeare, or at least Enrique Iglesias. 

Moonpig has revealed it is looking into integrating ChatGPT – the AI chatbot taking the world by storm – into its online platform.

This means that customers will be able to use the large language model to write a personalised message for inside their card.

ChatGPT has been trained on a huge sample of text from the internet, and can understand human language, conduct conversations with humans and generate detailed text.

The software is currently free for anyone to use, which has led to it being banned by academic institutions as students have been using it to write their assignments.

While Elon Musk has said it means it spells the end for homework, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates says it will ‘help us with teaching kids’.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was co-founded by Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk and has financial backing from Microsoft. 

It has also been used to pass exams, deliver a sermon, write software and prepare legal documents – to name just a handful of its functions.

A woman even reportedly divorced her husband based on relationship advice it gave her.

But will it be just as good with romance itself? MailOnline puts it to the test by asking it to write Valentine’s Day cards and poems.

We gave it the prompt ‘write a Valentine’s Day card for a golf-loving husband’, and this is what it produced:

Front: “Happy Valentine’s Day to my tee-rific husband”

Inside: “Forever and always, I’ll love you more than the birdie loves the hole. You make every day a hole in one with your love, laughter and golf skills. Can’t wait to tee off on this adventure with you. Love you to the moon and back.”

Next, we asked it to write a ‘romantic and funny poem which rhymes for a girlfriend who collects stamps’. 

“My dearest love, you light up my day, Your passion for stamps, just blows me away. You search high and low, with glee and delight, For treasures to add, to your collection, so bright.

“You pore over pages, with focus so keen, Discovering secrets, that others have seen. Your eyes twinkle, with joy and delight, As you find that special stamp, that makes your day bright.

“Oh, how I love, to see you so blessed, With a hobby that brings you, so much happiness. I’ll support you, in all that you do, And be here for you, through and through.

“So, here’s a rhyme, with love in my heart, A silly little poem, that sets us apart. You’re my love, my life, my everything, And I’m grateful, for you and your stamp-collecting thing!”

Nickyl Raithatha, the current chief executive of Moonpig, told The Times that his firm wants to embrace AI to enhance the customer experience.

This includes providing the option of a ChatGPT-generated message or poem, but also using it to recommend products.

Moonpig stores a lot of its customers’ personal data, including interests, card preferences, date of birth, marital status, and gender.

AI algorithms can be trained to recognise patterns in data like this, and then use it to perform tasks like tailored product recommendations.

Machine learning algorithms can continue learning to improve their ability to perform a certain task without being explicitly programmed to do so. 

Mr Raithatha told The Times: ‘We have invested heavily in embedding AI into our platform, using machine learning to generate recommendations and personalised promotions. 

‘Recent developments . . . open exciting new possibilities, and we are experimenting with how these could be used to help our customers write inspirational messages and create their own card designs in the future.’

The card retailer is also looking into integrating DALL-E into its online shop – a text-to-image tool which was also developed by OpenAI.

This AI is able to create images from simple text, add objects into existing images, or even provide different points of view on an existing image.

Moonpig told The Times that a DALL-E widget will allow customers to change an existing image, or create their own one, for the front of their card.

It has 250 data scientists working on the site, and is considering adding codes that link to celebrity video messages, like on Cameo, or digital expereinces.

Last year, Moonpig finalised its acquisition of Smartbox Group, the owner of experiences retailer Red Letter Days, for £124million. 

This comes after a turbulent year for the firm, after its shares tumbled amidst the Royal Mail strikes over Christmas.

It also suffered a post-COVID slump, after the lifting of restrictions prompted a slowdown in the online retail sector.