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The Street
The Street
Rob Lenihan

A University Student Just Used ChatGPT For This Genius Money Saving Hack

You can't fight City Hall, and thanks to artificial intelligence, you don't have to..

Since it's launch in November, Open AI’s ChatGPT platform has had more than 100 million users and there has been a lot of concern raised about the use--and potential misuse--of the wildly popular chatbot.

DON'T MISS: ChatGPT: Students Battle Over Using AI to Cheat in College

South Korean manufacturing conglomerate Samsung discovered that company employees had leaked sensitive company information with ChatGPT on three separate occasions.

The Italian Data Protection Watchdog recently ordered OpenAI to temporarily cease processing Italian users’ data amid a probe into a suspected breach of Europe’s privacy regulations.

Musk Sounds the Alarm

Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who co-created ChatGPT, and Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak were among a group of computer scientists and other tech types who had called for a six-month pause for training any systems more powerful than GPT-4, which, by the way, is smart enough to pass the bar exam.

But there are also some happy AI stories out there.

Take the case of Millie Houlton, a 22-year old student at York St John University in England, who got zonked with a parking ticket to the tune of about $75.

Houlton thought about breaking down and paying the fine, according to the BBC, but then she came up with a better idea. 

She asked ChatGPT to "please help me write a letter to the council, they gave me a parking ticket." 

Once the letter was completed, she sent it off and--whaddya know?--the authority withdrew the fine notice.

"I was like, 'oh I don't need this fine," Houlton said, "I'm a student' but trying to articulate what I wanted to say was pretty difficult so I thought I'll just see if ChatGPT can do it for me.”

And then what happened?

ChatGPT Steps Up

"I put in all my details about where and when it happened, why it was wrong and my reference for the fine and it came back with this perfectly formed personalized response within minutes," she said.

Really? And what did it say?

"It said I was a student and that I had paid for my permit for two years and I wasn't going to deliberately park somewhere I shouldn't," Houlton said.

Houlton said the fine was wrongly issued for parking on her street, since she has a permit to do so.

The chatbot's response was "great", she said, and it explained the situation perfectly.

Not surprisingly, she was "very relieved" when she received the local authority's letter revoking the fine.

While Houlton said had been using ChatGPT for a while, she only recently started using the AI for social occasions, including organizing an Easter egg hunt for her running club.

"I explained it was an Easter theme, put in all the locations in that I wanted to go to and it gave me riddles, clues and everything," she said.

Wait'll the Easter Bunny hears about this...

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