A Virginia woman won big at the Powerball lottery — using numbers picked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to The New York Post, in a story that’s only possible in the 21st Century.
“I’m like, ChatGPT, talk to me… Do you have numbers for me?” said Carrie Edwards, remembering how she requested the AI bot for help, during a press conference last week, as reported by the NY Post.
A few days later, the widow from Virginia got a phone notification that she won the Powerball drawing earlier this month.
Because she got the same four of the five numbers and the Powerball number, she got a $150,000 check that she plans to donate the winnings to several nonprofits: the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, Shalom Farms — a nonprofit food organization — and the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration, which funds research on the form of dementia that killed her husband last year.
“As soon as that divine windfall happened and came down upon my shoulders, I knew exactly what I needed to do with it,” she said at the press conference. “And I knew I needed to give it all away, because I’ve been so blessed, and I want this to be an example of how other people, when they’re blessed, can bless other people.”
To be clear, ChatGPT obviously can’t predict winning lottery numbers. Instead, Edwards effectively used it as a random number generator, and then got lucky.
In our AI age, though, this isn’t the first time somebody’s claimed they used an AI bot to win the lotto. Back in 2023, a Thai man said he used ChatGPT to successfully guess numbers for a local sweepstakes, though only for a piddling sum of $59.
And earlier this year, three university math students in Italy developed an algorithm that they claimed netted them more than $50,000 from a local drawing by spending just $350 on numbers that their algorithm said were overrepresented among winners; whether they actually beat the system like card counters at a game of blackjack is unclear, although hobbyists have occasionally found flukes in state lottery systems.
Reality check, though: you’re very unlikely to beat the odds using AI, even though the Apple store is already lousy with apps claiming to do exactly that.
Just remember that at the end of the day, lotteries and casinos exist for one reason — and the house always wins.
More on AI and gambling: Gannett Is Using AI to Pump Brainrot Gambling Content Into Newspapers Across the Country