Lottery forced to issue statement after Michigan woman wins $100,000 using ChatGPT prompt
Perhaps AI knows more than we thought
One woman might have shown that everyone has been using AI for the wrong reasons, as she managed to secure a $100,000 lottery victory by asking ChatGPT to generate the winning numbers.
While many of the most important people in the tech world want to reach a point where artificial intelligence outperforms the capabilities of humans, it's still at least a couple of years off and won't be entirely limitless.
Even when this is achieved though, AI is still broadly limited to what has already been written or conceived, but one lucky woman has 'proven' that perhaps ChatGPT can see into the future.
You don't need to have played the lottery to know that there's very little-to-no actual skill involved in picking the right numbers, as while you can view it from a perspective of probability, there's no way of actually knowing what numbers will be printed on the balls as they emerge.
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Most people stick to the same set of numbers that often tend to have a sentimental meaning as there's technically never a wrong choice, but one woman took a rather unorthodox method to picking her balls in the September edition of the Michigan Lottery.
As reported by the New York Post, 45-year-old Tammy Carvey asked ChatGPT to randomly generate a set of lottery numbers for her, and it ended up winning her a pot worth $100,000.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT wasn't the all-out AI-powered Nostradamus that she might have hoped as it didn't get the numbers that would have left her with $1.787 billion, but it did get four of the right Powerballs, and a clever decision on her part beforehand bumped up that prize even further.
"I asked ChatGPT for a set of Powerball numbers and those are the numbers I played," Carvey explained, according to KARE 11. "I only play Powerball when the jackpot gets up there and the jackpot was over $1 billion, so I bought a ticket."
Those four numbers did initially net her a $50,000 victory which is certainly nothing to scoff at, but she'd thankfully paid a little bit extra for Power Play, which doubled her winnings to $100,000.
"It wasn't until I logged into my Michigan Lottery account that I realized I added the Power Play to my ticket and actually won $100,000," she exclaimed, adding that "my husband and I were in total disbelief."
Michigan Lottery has since added a disclaimer to her victory though, declaring that "the results of all lottery drawings are random and cannot be predicted by utilizing artificial intelligence or other number-generating tools."
This doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't use ChatGPT to make your next set of lottery numbers, but don't expect it to have any greater success than picking them yourself. Tammy seemingly just go the luck of the draw.