Millie Houlton, a 22-year-old York St John University student in England, was ticketed for parking despite having a permit. Instead of just sitting back and accepting it, she came up with an ingenious method to overturn it – drafting and sending an appeal letter with the help of ChatGPT.
“Please help me write a letter to the council, they gave me a parking ticket,” she instructed the AI, as quoted by the BBC.
With her plate overflowing with academics, Houlton initially thought of quickly paying the fine. After all, who would choose to waste their time writing a lengthy letter and waiting for an unresponsive bureaucracy to respond within a reasonable time?
Students have work to do.
Houlton was fortunate to give ChatGPT, which is becoming incredibly popular, a try.
“I was like, ‘Oh I don’t need this fine, 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,” Houlton told the BBC.
“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.”
And to her surprise, the fine had been revoked. And it was that simple!
Caution: Although AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can speed up some tasks and provide a useful service, it’s important to be aware that these large language models do not always get the facts right. So if accuracy is a top priority for your work, double-checking the output from these tools is recommended.
And despite the buzz surrounding OpenAI’s GPT-4 upgrade to ChatGPT’s language model, it makes more errors than its predecessor.
However, it’s true that these AI writing assistants can generate very compelling content with an authoritative tone. Although, it is important to note that they should not be relied upon for delicate topics such as letters of condolences.
