A student managed to use the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to revoke a parking fine that was issued, despite her having a permit.
Millie Houlton, 22, from York, used the bot to write an email to the council which saw them revoke the £60 fine.
Believing she wouldn’t be able to get her point across herself, Business Management student Millie used the AI chatbot to conjure up a professionally worded email to appeal the fine.
Writing to ChatGPT asking it to help her write a letter to the council, the AI came back with a polite response for Millie to send.
After being successful and getting the fine revoked, in true student style, Millie used her £60 and went on a night out to celebrate.
Millie Houlton, 22, from York, used the bot to write up an email to the council which saw them revoke the £60 fine after she had parked over a yellow line
Miss Houlton said the fine was wrongly issued for parking on her street – as she has a permit to do so
Gatwick Airport motorist reduced hefty fine using ChatGPT – READ MORE
The ChatGPT appeal letter in full. Mr Bosley said: ‘In the end, I just typed, “write an appeal to a penalty charge notice for driving through Gatwick airport. I have received final notice, but never received first notice of the penalty”‘
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She explains: ‘I believe I wouldn’t have been able to word it the way ChatGPT did, without it I probably wouldn’t have had it taken it back.
‘I was relieved as I’m a student I don’t want to spend £60 if I can avoid it, I was so pleased I could find a tool that can assist in putting thoughts into words in a professional manner.
‘I came across ChatGPT mainly for work as I make content creation for businesses and I realised I could use it for other aspects of my life too.
‘I use it for photo captions and emails as well as everything else now.
‘I feel like the parking ticket was given to me wrongfully and I’m not good at putting points across on paper so I used ChatGPT and it worked to appeal it.
‘My friends have already started using it now to help them write letters too.
‘It’s just a matter of knowing your problem, telling ChatGPT and then it just puts it all into words in a professional way.
‘If you can use it in the right way it’s really good, although I have heard some horror stories.
‘I think if you know how to use it, it can give some good answers.
‘Everyone is talking about ChatGPT at the moment but I don’t think people would know to use it in this sense and revoke a parking fine.
Posting a video on TikTok of her ordeal, Millie has had lots of people asking her what ChatGPT is and how to use it.
She added: ‘I don’t think a lot of people know it’s a thing or how to utilise it properly, so now I make videos on how to use it as a student.
Believing she wouldn’t be able to get her point across herself, Business Management student Millie used the AI chatbot to conjure up a professionally worded email to appeal the fine.
‘I really didn’t expect the response I got on my TikTok, a lot of people have now seen it and are asking me what it is.
‘So many people have said it’s a good idea and have loved my video.’
The news comes shortly after a motorist who received a fine after driving through Gatwick Airport’s drop-off area challenged it using ChatGPT and won a much-reduced penalty.
Shaun Bosley, from Brighton, was dropping a work colleague at the airport last November and received a £100 ‘final notice’ from NCP several months later, despite saying he had received no previous correspondence.
Mr Bosley, a sales consultant for Phyron, a Swedish company which produces videos for car dealerships using AI, turned to ChatGPT.
The Brighton-based driver explained how he used the chatbot to write up an appeal to the fine, saying that it ‘came back with a great response’ as a result.
Mr Bosley said: ‘In the end, I just typed, “write an appeal to a penalty charge notice for driving through Gatwick airport.
‘I have received final notice, but never received first notice of the penalty”, and straight away it came back with a great response,’ he told the PA news agency.
Elon Musk’s hatred of AI explained: Billionaire believes it will spell the end of humans – a fear Stephen Hawking shared
Elon Musk wants to push technology to its absolute limit, from space travel to self-driving cars — but he draws the line at artificial intelligence.
The billionaire first shared his distaste for AI in 2014, calling it humanity’s ‘biggest existential threat’ and comparing it to ‘summoning the demon.’
At the time, Musk also revealed he was investing in AI companies not to make money but to keep an eye on the technology in case it gets out of hand.
His main fear is that in the wrong hands, if AI becomes advanced, it could overtake humans and spell the end of mankind, which is known as singularity.
That concern is shared among many brilliant minds, including the late Stephen Hawking, who told BBC in 2014: ‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
‘It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate.’
AI Despite his fear of AI, Musk has invested in San Francisco-based AI group Vicarious, DeepMind, which has since been acquired by Google and OpenAI, creating the popular ChatGPT program that has taken the world by storm in recent months.
During a 2016 interview, Musk noted that he and the OpenAI created the company to ‘have democratization of AI technology to make it widely available.’
Musk founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, but in 2018 the billionaire attempted to take control of the startup.
His request was rejected, forcing him to quit OpenAI and move on with his other projects.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, which became an instant success worldwide.
The chatbot is a large language model trained on a massive amount of text data, allowing it to generate eerily human-like text in response to a given prompt.
ChatGPT is used to write research papers, books, news articles, emails and more.
And while Altman is basking in its glory, Musk is attacking ChatGPT from all ends.
He says the AI is ‘woke’ and deviates from OpenAI’s original non-profit mission.
‘OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft, Musk tweeted in February.
Although it may seem OpenAI is on Musk’s target list, the billionaire is still concerned about AI reaching the singularity.
The word ‘singularity’ is making waves worldwide as artificial intelligence advances in ways only seen in science fiction – but what does it actually mean?
In simple terms, singularity describes a hypothetical future where technology surpasses human intelligence and changes the path of our evolution.
Experts have said that once AI reaches this point, it will be able to innovate much faster than humans.
There are two ways the advancement could play out, with the first leading to humans and machines working together to create a world better suited for humanity.
For example, humans could scan their consciousness and store it in a computer where they will live forever.
The second scenario is that AI becomes more powerful than humans, taking control and making humans its slaves – but if this is true, it is far off in the distant future.
Researchers are now looking for signs of AI reaching singularity, such as the technology’s ability to translate speech with the accuracy of a human and perform tasks faster.
Former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil predicts singularity will be reached by 2045.
He has made 147 predictions about technology advancements since the early 1990s and 86 percent have been correct.
