Featured Image Credit: @GageFBA/X/Nathan Stirk/Getty Images
Topics: McDonalds, Food and Drink
Lucy Devine
Topics: McDonalds, Food and Drink
A man has claimed that he used AI technology to bag hundreds of free McDonald's meals.
Love it or hate it, it certainly seems that artificial intelligence is only becoming more and more advanced.
Well, 22-year-old Gage - a self-proclaimed 'millionaire' businessman - has seemed to prove this very fact after he revealed on a podcast that for months, he's been using ChatGPT to claim freebies from the fast food chain McDonald's.
But how?
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Gage, who co-hosts All Things The Podcast, explained that over the past nine months, he's received over 100 free meals from Maccies.
And it's not required much effort from him at all, with Gage explaining that ChatGPT did all the work.
He explained that the first thing he does is 'steal receipts from tills or tables' and uses their unique code to fill in the McDonald's feedback survey.
Then, he uses AI to make fake complaints, claiming he's had a 'horrible experience' at the chain.
"If you just put you’re highly dissatisfied with every single answer and then use ChatGPT — you just type in something like, ‘Write about a time that I had a horrible experience at McDonald’s where I ordered a Big Mac and make it under 1,200 characters'," he explained.
"Copy that, you paste in... it’s usually really bad. And if it’s not bad enough, you might type, ‘Make it worse.'
"You punch that in, fill in an email, boom. In, like, 12 hours, a representative will send you an email with one, two, or three or four meal vouchers completely for free."
But it seems the businessman's tactic isn't harmless, with his local branch now refusing to give him a receipt following the masses of bad reviews.
"They’ve plastered posters up everywhere saying 'please fill in the survey and put highly satisfied'," he said.
And viewers were pretty shocked by Gage's attitude to what he's been doing, with many raising concerns that it could lead to the branch being closed down.
''It doesn’t harm anyone.’ It will when McDonald’s shut down that branch because it’s had thousands of bad reviews because someone is too cheap to buy a 99p burger," one person wrote.
And another said: "It does harm people, though. McDonald’s obviously target their franchisees and if customer satisfaction drops below a certain threshold then they risk losing the franchise."
All things considered, it's probably best to avoid this trick and leave honest feedback instead.
UNILAD has reached out to McDonald's for comment.