Utilising a letter generated by an AI chatbot, ChatGPT, a student successfully contested a £60 parking fine.

Millie Houlton considered paying the fine instead of drafting a response to the notice from York City Council, but requested ChatGPT to "assist me in composing a letter to the council regarding a parking ticket" and submitted it.

...the council then retracted the fine notice!

AI chatbots, which use information retrieval to provide human-like responses, can occasionally produce plausible but inaccurate or illogical answers, according to their creator, OpenAI.

Having a permit to park on her street, Miss Houlton claimed that the fine was unjustly imposed.

Due to being preoccupied with academic commitments in her final year of events and business management degree, the York St John University student contemplated paying the fine.

Expressing her thoughts, she remarked that being a student, she did not want to deal with the fine.

However, conveying her stance coherently was challenging, so she decided to test if ChatGPT could assist her. She provided details about the location, time, reason for contesting the fine, and the reference number, and in no time, ChatGPT generated a personalised and faultlessly composed response.

According to Miss Houlton, the chatbot's reply was excellent, accurately presenting the issue. The response emphasised that she was a student who had purchased a permit for two years and had no intention of intentionally parking in an unauthorised location.

So, what is ChatGPT?

OpenAI has created a free AI language model called ChatGPT, which is a member of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series of models. These models are engineered to produce human-like language and carry out language-based tasks like summarisation, translation, and answering questions.

ChatGPT, specifically, is programmed to interact with people like a human and provide useful answers to their inquiries, making it a frequently used option for chatbot applications in numerous sectors.