A Virginia woman used ChatGPT to win $150,000 playing Powerball

Carrie Edwards made headlines last week for winning $150,000 in the September 8 Powerball drawing - and giving it all away to charity.

She later revealed another fascinating aspect of her win: she used ChatGPT to choose her winning numbers.

Can AI get lucky?

Edwards, from Midlothian, Virginia, had never played online before when she decided to give it a shot. The jackpot at the time was $1.7 billion, when a lot of rare players took chances.

Edwards logged onto ChatGPT, the Large Language Model artificial intelligence tool. She wrote a prompt, asking ChatGPT to generate lottery numbers for her.  The AI initially warned her that the numbers were all about luck, according to Newsweek. But after giving her disclaimers, the AI gave her random numbers.

The winning numbers were 26-28-41-53-64, with a red Powerball 9. Using the Virginia Lottery’s mobile app, Edwards matched four numbers, winning $50,000. She purchased Power Play for an extra $1, tripling her prize to $150,000. 

She received notifications about her win and thought they were a scam - but her winnings were delivered by Virginia Lottery Executive Director Khalid Jones. She quickly donated all of the money to dementia research, hungry families, and military personnel, according to the Virginia Lottery.

Later, she revealed that she had used ChatGPT to get her numbers.

How AI works in the lottery

A Large Language Model like ChatGPT is designed to scrape existing data and provide a likely result, maximizing popularity.

For example, if you ask ChatGPT to create a Facebook post explaining how beginners should start using a pottery wheel, it will gather all of the pertinent pottery wheel information available on the Internet - books, sites, human feedback, social media, and more. It will use that information to present a post that aligns with top-performing Facebook content. In other words, at its best, AI is using known information to assemble the best answer it can. It cannot predict completely unknown ideas, like, say, a psychic might portend to do. 

AI is not a lottery silver bullet

With stories like Edwards’, it’s tempting to see AI as a lucky ticket. If it predicts lottery numbers, ChatGPT could also have picked numbers totally at random.

It could also be using age-old tricks - like looking at historic draws, seeing patterns, choosing numbers that haven’t been picked in a while, and other probability strategies. Advanced tools have always claimed that these tactics can get you closer to winning. But put simply: past wins cannot predict future wins. Draw numbers depend on too many factors - from almost 300 million number combinations to the temperature in the drawing room. Edwards’ odds of winning were 1 in 913,129.18, and she simply got lucky.

AI is no more than a random number generator. It’s no better than a psychic, even. If players use the tool accordingly, then it’s perfectly safe to use in lottery play. But in an age when people are using ChatGPT to replace friends and lovers, it’s important to stay vigilant of expectations.