Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old British student at Stanford University, has created a chatbot (DoNotPay.co.uk) that successfully challenged parking tickets in London and New York City.

The chat interface asks a few basic questions and then auto-generates a legal appeal for a parking ticket (it can also make a claim for compensation regarding delayed flights). Alternatively, a simple Web form is available for those who don’t want to interact with an AI.

"When I started the website, it was because I got a few parking tickets myself," Joshua Browder told Ars by phone. "Local governments aren’t issuing these tickets when people are doing something wrong—they’re doing it to raise revenue."

Browder claims that 160,000 parking tickets have been challenged so far, with a "low 60 percent" success rate.

"I think it just shows how they’re being overzealous in giving out the tickets," Browder added. "When you get a ticket, there’s a feeling of desperation and anger. I think that’s why the site’s been so successful. These tickets are so expensive—I don’t have any income and lots of people who have tickets in the UK don’t have income or are pensioners. The fact that they are such a large percentage of your weekly income—it’s such a disproportionate percentage of your income, it’s really unfair."

He said that parking fines in London are often £150 ($198), but in New York, they range from $35 to $115.

"If it can work in New York, it can work anywhere," he said.

The New York City Department of Transportation did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

Browder has plans to roll out his parking ticket chatbot to Seattle next. Beyond that, his next project is a similar chatbot designed to help Arabic-speaking asylum seekers and refugees fill out applications to receive public benefits and other documents, auto-generating the forms in both English and Arabic.

Listing image by Sunny Ripert