A Michigan woman won $100,000 in her local Powerball draw after turning to AI for help and asking it to pick her winning numbers.
Tammy Carvey, 45, won in September’s Powerball jackpot, which had reached $1.787 billion, after having ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, generate a random set of lottery numbers for her to use.
“I only play Powerball when the jackpot gets up there, and the jackpot was over $1 billion, so I bought a ticket,” she told the Michigan Lottery after she recently collected her prize. “I asked ChatGPT for a set of Powerball numbers and those are the numbers I played on my ticket.”
Carvey matched four white balls and the Powerball, which is usually a $50,000 prize. But Carvey had forgotten that she paid extra for the Power Play feature, which multiples prizes, so her total was actually $100,000.
“Google told me it was a $50,000 prize, so that’s what I thought I’d won,” she said. “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! My husband and I were in total disbelief.”
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Carvey revealed that she plans to use her winnings to pay off her home and save the rest.
In response to Carvey using AI to help select her numbers, the Michigan Lottery said that “the results of all Lottery drawings are random and cannot be predicted by utilizing artificial intelligence or other number generating tools.”
This isn’t the first time a lottery winner has admitted to using AI to help select winning numbers.
A Virginia woman named Carrie Edwards recently said she used ChatGPT to select Powerball numbers for a September draw. She won $150,000 and donated the money to charity.
She split her winnings into three $50,000 donations to the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration, Shalom Farms and the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society.
“I’m like, ‘ChatGPT, talk to me, talk to me about this $1.7 billion … And do you have numbers for me?’ And he goes … ‘Carrie, you know it’s all about luck, right?’” Edwards said during a press conference.
ChatGPT then gave Edwards some numbers and she decided to play the lottery online.
Edwards said two days later she was sitting in a meeting when she received a notification on her phone that read: “Please collect your lottery winnings.”
She said at first she thought it was a scam but after verifying the news, she knew what she wanted to do.
“As soon as that divine windfall happened and came down upon my shoulders, I knew exactly what I needed to do with it. 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,” she said.
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