The “Robin Hood of the internet” isn’t an outlaw from Loxley with a bow and arrow.
He’s a 19-year-old Londoner with a robot lawyer who wants to help you fight your parking tickets.
After first dipping his toes in the litigation game this fall, Joshua Browder’s AI-equipped chatbot DoNotPay has already challenged and voided 160,000 of the 250,000 tickets it has face in London and New York, good for a success rate of 64%.
After logging onto the bot’s website, users answer a series of questions about how they ended up getting ticketed (sign visibility, parking area size, etc.) in order to determine if they have a legal basis to appeal. If the bot determines the user should challenge the ticket, it takes them through the necessary steps to file and win the appeal.
“I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society,” Browder told VentureBeat. “These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.”
Browder — who is already working on a host of other bots to help people deal with everything from flight delays at the airport to seeking asylum in a foreign country — hopes to expand the service to Seattle in the near future.
Main image courtesy of Alex Proimos
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