Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT

I do online marketing for many small websites in my portfolio.<p>Yesterday I had to write some fairly boilerplate landing page content for 13 types of sub-services.<p>In each case I asked ChatGPT to write 500 words in the style I wanted.<p>It did a very decent job and I only had to edit a word here or there for style.<p>It’s miles better than most people on Fiver or other freelance sites.<p>Normally I’d seek someone to do this copywriting. But in this case it was well written, the facts were correct and properly formatted and presented.<p>I would pay for this monthly as it’s been so useful for so many things recently.

“If you cannot afford an attorney, a GPT cloud instance will be appointed for you, subject to the standard Community Guidelines of acceptable opinions held by defendants.”

I&#x27;m surprised no one in this thread has pointed out the dystopian future this leads to.<p>Extend out the trendline, and you have everyone writing to each other with ChatGPT enhancement. It is the fallacy of composition applied to semi-professional prose. When we all enhance our writing into the same anodyne prose, it isn&#x27;t a leg up anymore, it&#x27;s just the baseline. At the same time, any individual who depends on this tech will see their writing skills atrophy.<p>In the early days of the internet, many predicted that it would be a pure win for society, with no downsides. By 2022 we have seen the entire story play to completion, and it&#x27;s much more complicated. The mainstream web is like a giant, tacky Walmart, with everyone hooked on dopamine hits. It&#x27;s terrible in many ways, and I don&#x27;t think anyone in 1998 would have predicted the specific ways that the 2022 internet is terrible.<p>How does ChatGPT projected out 20 years look? I expect like a cross between Tiktok, Walmart and mid-wit Netflix shows.

Now the council official just needs to run ChatGPT on their side to decide whether to accept or deny requests, and we&#x27;ll have automated the entire process.

You know just before an earthquake you can hear the sounds of thousand chariots (kind of captured here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KLswGzuCQBc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KLswGzuCQBc</a>).<p>Thats how it feels looking at ChatGPT.<p>I showed it to few few friends and each of them started using it immediately, and I dont mean just playing with it, but using it for their work. I showed it to my daughter and she started using it (to have creative combinations of idiot and pig in japanese - buta baka and so on, but also to sum list of lists of lists of integers in python)<p>I love this feeling of uncertainty, I can not predict where things will go, its both exciting and terrifying. Will google disappear? Will we even use the web anymore? Is it the end of static software, but now every program has some sort of ABI like interface to be modified by GPT?<p>It feels like the start of a new paradigm of how we use computers.

I write things a lot of times in not the nicest way. Not mean but very blunt and matter of factly.<p>I&#x27;ve started to use GPTChat for important emails and it&#x27;s been a huge help. I can&#x27;t wait to have it directly integrated into my email app.

I can&#x27;t help but think that sending them the original input to ChatGPT:<p>&quot;I paid in EasyPark but acidently mistyped the number plate&quot;<p>Would have resulted in the same response of the fine being refunded.

ChatGPT really is ridiculously good. I’ve had it writing harmonic progressions recently and it does that well too. I can give it a song structure and mood and it will quickly generate a chord progression for the song, breaks it out into sections and explains how the chord choices create the requested mood. I’m shocked at how well they have worked.

&gt; It&#x27;s like having a talented personal assistant (who is often wrong - need to read their work thoroughly) at your fingertips.<p>I dispute the word &quot;talented&quot; here. A talented PA, and one I would pay good money for, would not need me to closely proof read every single piece of correspondence they write. It would be faster for me to do it myself.<p>And this is why AI in its current form will not be accepted for serious applications, or where it is, we will see a severe decrease in quality.

I get his point, but this really seems like another case where writing the ChatGPT prompt takes almost as much effort as writing the message yourself.

One of the final hurdles for self driving cars

The thing I most value chatGPT so far is that it is pretty good at answering fairly basic programming questions I have throughout the day. I&#x27;ve asked to to generate more advanced code &#x2F; ideas with some pretty weird results.

It seems weird to write &quot;I ... request that you consider disputing ...&quot;. Isn&#x27;t it the writer of the letter who is disputing it?

I live in Cairns. Based on some of my previous interactions with the council I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if your AI was talking to their AI &#x2F; crudely programmed spreadsheet. That said, if you actually stop and chat to some of the parking inspectors you&#x27;ll find some of the nicest &#x2F; most understanding people in the business. Which is saying a lot considering they walk around in 30°C+ (with a plus 25 dew point) for much of the year. I&#x27;ve had them rip up tickets, sign them to make sure they don&#x27;t fine me later, and stand around making jokes about the abuse they get. Good bunch. Very human.

If one was to lose this argument and be made to pay a fine, could they demand the original parking fee back? Obviously they paid for a service that was not rendered.

How will a teacher know that most of a submitted term paper wasn&#x27;t written by ChatGPT? Do you think it would stand up to the usual plagiarism checks? Also, I feel like us becoming the passengers on the Wall-E ship is getting closer and closer.

The reason this post is pointless is the prompt could have been the whole letter.

ChatGPT is really weird. I&#x27;ve gotten it to tell me that it can&#x27;t write stories or poetry or anything like that.<p>I then asked it to write a haiku about its inability to write and it did a pretty good job.

I’ve had so many fun and productive conversations with it.<p>So far it’s helped me in these ways:<p>- Improved an email asking for a game of mine to be featured.<p>- Wrote variants to NPC dialogue to make it less repetitive.<p>- Wrote a new short Star Trek TNG episode out of video clips I said I had.<p>- Explained to me steps I didn’t understand in some math.<p>- Helped us choose winter shoes.<p>- Told me about an algo I had never heard about.<p>There’s many more, and this was just in two days or so. I’m especially excited about figuring out how to better use it for creating story game content or short videos.

I&#x27;m probably the only one who finds ChatGPT deeply disturbing.

I&#x27;ve been discovering this for the first time over the last 24 hours and, much like many others, it really has blown my mind. My various thoughts have been:<p>- This does feel like a new way of accessing information. Could Google pivot to this? Maybe, but turning ships that large really isn&#x27;t quick or easy. And this technology is so obviously useful that I&#x27;m not sure they&#x27;ll be given much time.<p>- Is this what we can expect from the new Apple search engine? Is this going to be another iphone-unveiling moment? Maybe, but they haven&#x27;t been amazing at delivering cloud services.<p>- How is this going manifest in my professional life. Does InteliJ&#x2F;VSCode have a built-in agent that I can ask to draft code for me? Do they own that, or does my IDE just hook into GPT BigCo&#x27;s service that we all have a subscription for?<p>- How could this be used to generate advertising revenue? (because I&#x27;m sure Google is asking itself that question). Is that possible, or will a different revenue stream be required?<p>- Are there any major limits on how much this technology can improve? Sure it seems to work great with images, prose, and code. But in the future could it design me a house? Plan a wedding? Manage my builders for me? Be a friend? Or do those involve solving other additional really hard problems, and code&#x2F;images&#x2F;prose are just the low hanging fruit?<p>- Will API design not matter? Will APIs become more important, or irrelevant? Will this technology just be able to use whatever interface you want to present to the world, be it an old XML SOAP API, a reactive web frontend, or running shell commands?<p>- How much training data is required for this technology to be able to use our services? Do only huge services have enough training data out there? Can this technology ever learn to use my little new REST API that I&#x27;ve just published docs for? Will my little service be forever ignored if it cannot?<p>Answers welcome<p>EDIT: Minor proofing changes

I went down a dark hole generating content using ChatGPT, including writing:<p>* a letter to the president of BofA explaining what bofa means<p>* a sarcastic review of my Krav Maga school<p>* an episode of Sex and the City, except the cast is very dim<p>* a bio for HN explaining that I make a lot of logic errors<p>Overall, the results were very impressive.

My HSA upstated their app and the update is a real step backwards in usability. I wanted to write a complaint but was too busy and figured what’s the point?<p>Just put a few details into chatGPT and now have a pretty good letter to send.

I want to play with OpenAI so badly, but my only phone number is a Google Voice number; and their sign-up refuses to allow it for whatever reason.<p>This is my phone number for the last 17 years...

I think most soft devs seems to be dissing ChatGPT because they don&#x27;t see it being useful. It probably is not for them but as someone that is tech literate but can&#x27;t program for shit I think this is great for people like me. I have been using it to improve my bash and python scripts. Most of the answers it gives are probably are already available on the web but asking a question and getting a correct answer is amazing.

Next thing someone will put an AI to do the chatting for him on the myriads of dating platforms out there and notify only when there&#x27;s interesting for a date.

I just found out about ChatGPT a few days ago. I tested it out by asking it to answer some stack overflow questions which I had answered myself on SO. In every case, ChatGPT worded responses in a much simpler&#x2F;clearer way than I’d done myself. Really amazing stuff.

This might have been faster than typing it out yourself… but not by much. Call me skeptical…

The most amazing thing about that story is that the city council replied the very next day! Esp. in Cairns - FNQ has something of a reputation of being somewhere that governments operate at an extremely laid back pace.

Well, on the other side once city parking enforcement agency employs it to respond to disputes or a business such as insurance company uses it as a cs agent, it’s gonna turn into a nightmare very quickly.

Here is that exact use caseI posted for fun last week <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33839175" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33839175</a>

The shire in is Cairns Regional Council, in Far North Queensland, Australia. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cairns.qld.gov.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cairns.qld.gov.au&#x2F;</a>

Is it possible to see where the generated text exactly came from?

Now combine that with speech to text and text to speech, and chatGPT will become a fantastic secretary, making and taking reservations and the like.

Maybe let the AI enter your license plate the next time. ;-)

I had to write invitations to my daugthers birthdays and it did a really good job filling out the boilerplate. I just had to tweak a few words and hit send.

I&#x27;ve felt ChatGPT is pretty great for creating generalizations &#x2F; broad observations but when it gets to specifics, it can fail.

I&#x27;m at the point where I wonder if I should preface my professional copy with &#x27;certified written by an actual human&#x27;.

Now I think I can use ChatGPT to find model answers for my IELTS exam preparation.

It seems like this technology could be used to launch a DoS attack on government bodies.

I don&#x27;t understand the point. It takes less time to write it yourself directly in your mail client than to login onto some slow website, phrase your request, wait for the response, proofread, iterate, and copy it into your mail client.<p>Let alone screenshot, edit the screenshots, author a blog article, etc.

Soon email clients will be detecting GPT generated content and show warnings.

I knew it wouldn’t be long before this was used for evil.

ChatGPT is not incredible. It is dopey and irresponsible. It reminds me of that video of the rube goldberg machine that is so sloppily constructed that the maker has to physically intervene at every stage. Except that is a parody.<p>I think this serves as a test to separate wishful thinkers from critical thinkers.

The letter is not incredible. It contains only information that you provided! This is a sad use of an AI, making it into a text-to-text recognition system. It took longer to contrive this experiment and fix its omissions than it would have to write the same 2-paragraph letter yourself.