Chris Place had his pride and joy nabbed, so turned to ChatGPT after police closed the case.
Chris Place explains it all…
“The craic is, I had my bike stolen. I informed the police and gave frame number and pictures, but heard nothing other than ‘CCTV inconclusive’. I managed to saturate local social media, lots of enthusiastic sharing, even Josh Bryceland gave a shout out. but nothing heard back, and the police closed the case ‘pending further inquiries’ etc.
“Cue lots of musing and mourning…
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“These cretins who nick your beloved, have no idea of the thought, the details, the miles and achievements and fun. That bike’s crossed country coast to coast, it’s taken me up mountains, and all the places in-between. I loved that bike, an absolute tank – I only ride hardtails and got that one so dialled in for me and my level of ability, there’s a financial hit – but the bike means more if ya know what I mean.
“Had a chat with my brother, and he said “get ChatGPT to see if it can look for it”! I had no idea if it would work. I’m not a coder, but I can certainly ask the question to an AI. And that’s what I did. And it came back with suggestions.
“I chose what terms and places I wanted to search on etc. ChatGPT came back with which sites would allow scrapes without login and such like, keeping things simpler. ChatGPT said to download Python [a coding language], install something called Beautiful Soup and that kicked out a script and some instructions to run in Terminal on my Mac… et voila!
“It didn’t work at first and had some errors, which I fed back and then GPT fixed it. It logs all searches, anything that matches my bike, visually and spec list and I get an email response with link to destination.”
Has it worked?
“No hits yet, I’ve been manually searching as well and got all email alerts setup etc. It’s been over a week now, I’m hurting a bit. Who knows if me and Baron Von Trek will ever be reunited, but I hope one day.”
We’ll (hopefully) update this story as and when anything turns up.
Hopefully you find and recover your bike.
Then with the help of AI you can send in the drone recovery team complete with RoboCop ?.
Been thinking I want to learn Python. Maybe I just need this Beautiful Soup instead.
Really hope you get your bike back.Â
As the headline is a question… I’m going with no, it can’t.
Has it worked? “No hits yet…"
Sorry, that made me laugh – was expecting the article to be a fully accomplished good news story. Good luck finding it.
Otherwise, it sounds like my job for years trying to get scripts to work before realising I’d entirely manufactured the requirements for it.
Have you tested it using pictures / a vagueish description of a bike that is listed on one of those sites?
Would be worth validating before relying on it doing what it says it will.
Mea culpa – you’re totally right! This is indeed not a bike. It’s a horse. Thanks for spotting that. Would you like me to make a bullet point list on how to identify bicycles?
Good effort, but sad to say it’ll have probably ended up in two ways…
1) sold for a pittance in a pub, so no internet footprint to find.
2) stripped, frame dumped, and decent parts sold on eBay/Facebook/etc.