How ChatGPT can help cancel a parking ticket: the ingenious move of a British student

A student in Britain has successfully appealed against a parking fine by using a letter written by an artificial intelligence chatbot.

Millie Houlton was fined £60 ($74) for no reason because she had paid for her parking two years ago. The final-year student at York St John's University had a heavy academic load at the time, so, as she addmitted, she already intended to pay the fine and not waste time and effort on appealing it. However, as reported by the BBC, since the fine was clearly illegal, the girl finally decided to contest it and turned to the help of a chatbot to write a letter of appeal.

OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has informed users that the chatbot sometimes gives trustworthy but not correct answers, and sometimes gives nonsensical answers, but this did not stop the girl. She fed the chatbot all the details of where and when it happened, why it was wrong, and within minutes the neural network returned a perfectly composed letter stating that she was a student and had paid for a parking permit for two years in advance, and is not going to park where it is prohibited. As a result, the city authorities canceled the fine.

The student said that it is not the first time that she has applied for the help of artificial intelligence. Millie is studying event planning and business management. She had informed the chatbot that Easter was coming soon and that she wanted to organize a quest at their running club and indicated where she wanted to hide the painted eggs. Artificial intelligence created the necessary hints and puzzles for her.