• Source:JND
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Carrie Edwards, a Virginia grandma, had a life-changing surprise when she hit the Powerball jackpot for USD 150,000, with a little assistance from ChatGPT. According to a report by The New York Post, Edwards first won USD 50,000. Since she paid an additional dollar for the Power Play feature, her amount tripled to USD 150,000 (approximately Rs 1.32 crore).

Edwards, a non-regular online lottery gambler, said that she employed her cell phone's ChatGPT application to produce possible lottery numbers. "I'm like, ChatGPT, talk to me… Do you have numbers for me?" she said in a news conference. ChatGPT must have told her that winning is just a matter of chance because the numbers it produced were actually the winning choice.

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Moment Of Realisation

Two days after playing the numbers, Edwards was in a meeting when an alert on her phone shocked her: "Please collect your lottery winnings." Initially, she believed it was a scam. "I know I didn't win," she confessed. After confirming the news, she discovered she was the surprise winner of the USD 150,000 Powerball drawing in Virginia.

Edwards chose to donate 100 percent of her winnings to charity, shocking those around her. She briefly considered keeping half and donating the rest, but ultimately decided to give the full amount to causes that mattered deeply to her. One of them deals with dementia research, remembering her late husband, Steve, who died due to frontotemporal degeneration in 2023.

Steve, an American hero who was at the Pentagon when it was attacked on 9/11 and took the historic photo of a flag being draped on the building, inspired Edwards to make her decision. She felt that he would have wholeheartedly endorsed her decision to apply the winnings toward something good.

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Turning Luck Into Legacy

Edwards' story is a stark contrast to the common lottery tale, one that is frequently driven by lavish spending, paying off debts, or financial errors. To her, the winnings were never about the cash but about living up to her deceased husband's memory and fulfilling causes dear to his heart.