A student used ChatGPT to get out of a $75 parking fine she felt she shouldn't have been issued

• A student used AI to write a letter to her council to contest a parking fine.
• She felt she'd been wrongly fined and wanted to save time by using ChatGPT to write the letter.

A student in the UK used ChatGPT to get out of a £60 ($74.30) parking fine that she doesn't think should have been issued.

Millie Houlton told Insider that roadworks around where she lived meant she couldn't park her Citroën car in her usual spot, which she has a permit for, so she parked elsewhere on March 20 following guidance from a traffic warden. But she was issued a parking fine.

Houlton, who had previously used ChatGPT to summarize readings for her university studies, decided that to save time she would use the generative AI system to send a letter to the local council in York explaining her situation. Two days later, the council told her it would no longer be fining her, in a letter to Houlton viewed by Insider.

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"I just found it a bit easier to use a tool that could put my thoughts into words and get my point across properly," she told Insider.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, and since then the platform has rocketed, reaching 100 million monthly active users in just over two months. Since then, Google has debuted its own generative AI, Bard, while Microsoft has launched a new version of Bing, powered by AI.

Generative AI platforms like these have been used to write news articles, shopping lists, code, and even novels. Advocates say the services can help workers save time on manual tasks, but there are concerns that it could plagiarize material, develop bias, and even argue with users.

Houlton said the text ChatGPT generated for her was very professional and the only amendments she'd had to make were adding some personal details. And even though she put a good amount of detail in the bullet-point prompt – which helps ChatGPT generate a more accurate and thorough response – she didn't have to worry about the grammar, formatting, and degree of formality in her prompt, she said.

Some students have been using ChatGPT to help write college entrance essays or assessments, leading to a number of institutions banning students from using the software, using AI detectors to check whether students wrote the work they handed in themselves, or otherwise changing the nature of their assignments to reflect the new use of the technology.

Newer versions of ChatGPT, including the recently-released GPT-4, have been performing better in exams. "I think the chat writes better than 95% of my students could ever," a professor at Northern Michigan University previously told Insider after catching two students submitting essays written by ChatGPT.

Houlton said some of her friends are using the software to write résumés and cover letters for jobs, or to check the grammar in text they've written themselves.

Houlton said wouldn't use ChatGPT to write assessments because it's not always accurate and universities are cracking down on AI-generated text.

"Everyone knows at university that you can get caught using it, so we're just trying to stay clear of it," she said.