A motorist who received a fine after driving through Gatwick Airport’s drop-off area challenged it using ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) 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, which generates human-like conversations. Users simply type a request into a chat box and the system can generate a response almost instantly.
“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.
ChatGPT helped him create the appeal which referenced the “undue stress and hardship” the final notice had caused, and also requested that NCP provide “information regarding the circumstances” as to why Mr Bosley had failed to receive a first notice.
In the appeal letter, ChatGPT wrote: “I understand that it is my responsibility as a driver to be aware of the rules and regulations regarding driving through an airport. However, I never received the first notice of the penalty and therefore, did not have the opportunity to contest the charge or pay the fine in a timely manner.
“I believe that the debt collection process has been premature and I request that you reconsider the penalties imposed.”
Motorists dropping passengers at Gatwick must pay £5 for a maximum of 10 minutes. They are charged an additional £1 for every minute they stay after that up to a maximum of 20 minutes.
Mr Bosley said NCP replied “the next day” and reduced the fine to £15, which was the original amount.
He added: “It’s insane how it writes like a human. I didn’t have to look at it and think ‘that sounds like a robot, I need to change some of it’, it was so conversational.”
NCP told PA it “takes appeals on their own individual merit”.
The ChatGPT written appeal in full:
“Dear Sir or Madam,
“I am writing in regards to a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) I have received for driving through Gatwick airport. I have received a final notice but have not received the first notice of the penalty. I was shocked to receive the final notice and am appealing the penalty on the grounds that I was not aware of the violation until this final notice.
“I understand that it is my responsibility as a driver to be aware of the rules and regulations regarding driving through an airport. However, I never received the first notice of the penalty and therefore, did not have the opportunity to contest the charge or pay the fine in a timely manner.
“The sudden receipt of the final notice, without having received the first notice, has caused me undue stress and hardship. I believe that the debt collection process has been premature and I request that you reconsider the penalties imposed.
“I would be grateful if you could review the case and take into consideration my request for a waiver of the penalties.
“I would also appreciate it if you could provide me with information regarding the circumstances surrounding my failure to receive the first notice of the penalty.
“Thank you for taking the time to consider my appeal. I look forward to hearing from you soon.”
Weird – probably 99% of organisations would ignore that otherwise good letter, on the simple grounds of it not mentioning any document references whatsoever (or have readers of B&H News only been given a redacted version, rather than the purported full version?).
And naturally a valid concern for all citizens has to be the use by public bodies of ChatGPT, or similar authoring software, in replying to our various concerns with responses even more obfuscatory than those from our City Council often are already (albeit one would hope that ChatGPT is sufficiently sophisticated to avoid those confusing ambiguities so beloved of too much of UK officialdom nowadays?).
And just for those not very close to the AI scene – there isn’t really much ‘Intelligence’, Artificial or otherwise, being used, except for the cleverness of correctly interpreting human requests, phrased in almost every imaginable combination of words and phrases. But Google Search had already reached that pinnacle of Human Language Recognition quite a few years ago – so nothing new under the sun?
However much of what is being touted as AI is merely the use of expensive (and power-hungry!) super computers to interrogate gigantic databases, growing larger by the day, at incredibly high speed – bringing the prophecies of the book Database Nation, published in January 2000, to ever more people.
With the great risk to our personal privacy that tech firms throughout the free world are lobbying governments to give them access to hitherto confidential databases, – to feed their data-hungry systems with even more personal data than they’re already harvesting from people’s use 9f the internet!
Attempting to justify this Invasion of Privacy on the grounds of gaining a commercial advantage for a country’s ‘AI Industry’, and spurious promises that Pseudonymisation will avoid individual identification!
In fact its very unlikely to do that – research by a Xalifornian University professor has identified over 4000 ‘Data Aggregator’ firms building-up individual profiles of as many of the world’s citizens as they can, with up to 3000 categories of data per person. So their computers are running night and day to join-up-the-dots to link as much data as possible to each named individual!
No need to apologise here for sounding, to the geeks and the money-grabbers, like a Luddite – it’s truer now than ever it was that once the data genie’s out of the bottle it simply can’t be put back in!
Thus our City councillors, particularly those newly-elected in May, now need to be hyper-vigilant to prevent Town Hall officers from spending ratepayer’s money on systems so data-hungry they’d have George Orwell screaming from his grave that: ‘I told you so in my book 1984!’.
Which indeed he did, way back in 1949 – with such amazing foresight!
Yes it is so human like. It is even milking it like a human would!
How does something you’re not aware of cause you “undue stress and harm”?
So yes from that perspective it has got it spot on. Let’s hope these companies don’t start using it a a response tool it I feel we would end up in a infinite loop of AI arguing with each other ???
Forgive typos. It was the AI fighting back!
This is nothing better than the tons of models laying around to answer such fines. A quick google search would find it too. And this is what ChatGPT used to learn. Unimpressive in this case.
Use human intelligence and pay the drop off fee before going to the airport !!!!!
Would save time and money and there would be no need for an artificial world !!