New York Lottery Uses AI to Help Players Picture Jackpot Fantasies

Everyone who plays the lottery dreams of what they'd do if they won – but sometimes it’s hard to picture these dreams becoming a reality. So, the New York Lottery and McCann New York asked New Yorkers to picture what they'd do if they won and comment on social media with their most out-of-this-world fantasies, and then brought them to life in a powerful and beautiful way. 

To bring every New York Lottery player’s dream to life in beautiful AI-generated images, McCann New York used Shutterstock’s first-of-its-kind, brand-safe AI Image Generator which offers compensation to artists whose work contributed to the development of the model and ensures the AI images are created from images that the user has rights to. Finalising the images took anywhere between 6-10 generations for each, with the teams looking at variations and giving the generator feedback until it created the perfect image.  

The socially driven campaign, combining AI and real-time response, was the first of its kind from McCann New York for New York Lottery. By looking at the AI Image Generator’s work and giving it critiques, the generator became another member of the creative team, resulting in a one-of-a-kind campaign targeting those who already play the lottery and those who think about it, but never do. 

Beyond the traditional dreams of home upgrades and vacations, the team received surprisingly descriptive comments. From there, McCann New York transformed these millionaire dreams into even dreamier AI-generated images in real-time, helping their followers visualise a jackpot win. From a skatepark in Brooklyn dedicated to helping others manifest their dreams to a dream home with a huge library inside (which AI visualised as a cape-cod style house made of bookshelves), no dream was too small – or too big.