This robot lawyer has gotten people out of 160,000 parking tickets — for free

DoNotPay is a chatbot designed to guide people through appealing parking tickets for free.
(Image credit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Before our robot overlords enslave us, they are at least going to save us some cash on parking tickets. Or, at least, one is.

DoNotPay is a chatbot created by a 19-year-old Stanford University student named Joshua Browder, who calls his creation the "world's first robot lawyer." The artificial intelligence program, which is a free service, talks with users who want to contest parking tickets to determine whether their case stands a chance for appeal. If the facts are right, the robot lawyer guides them through the appeals process. So far, it has helped users appeal some 250,000 tickets, winning the case for 160,000, or almost two-thirds of the time.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.