Inspector Lewis closed his mouth, opened it, muttered "Fuck it" and turned back to the Trainee Pastry Chef, Jamal.

"Explain it again, this time with less stuttering, and more facts."

"I made a wedding cake."

"Per the instructions?"

"Yes, absolutely, no deviations, no improvisation." A brittle smile cracked his face, "I wouldn't know how."

"And this is from ChatGPT?"

Lewis expected Jamal's head to come clean off his shoulders with how hard he was nodding.

"Hard to believe, but okay, let's start there."

Lewis looked at the 'wedding cake'. First, even if the damned thing hadn't toppled it would never have made it outside through the gate. Maybe through the skylight, not that it mattered. Nobody would be eating this bloody wedding cake, the head chef lay crushed underneath it.

Jamal took out his phone and tapped an icon titled ChatGPT, "I simply opened the app, and asked for a wedding cake." The app displayed the recipe.

"How did you make it so," he paused, choosing the right word, "tall?!" The aroma of vanilla did not mix well with the stench of decomposition.

"Scaffolding." He pointed to a few metal implements in the corner, festooned with chocolate buttons. Lewis blinked, confused. Jamal continued, "The app told me to."

"It told you to decorate the scaffolding?"

"Yes, see?" The app had generated an image, based on wedding cakes, with buttons on the scaffolding as if it was a part of the cake.

Where had all the critical thinking gone?

Jamal swiped up to show a diagram of the inside. Two meter wide monstrosity he had constructed, complete with a reservoir of boiling caramel, more caramel than Lewis had seen in his lifetime.

Again, this was consistent with the CCTV footage of the head chef taking a knife to the cake's base and collapsing it on top of himself, all three stories of it.

"Can I see that?" asked Lewis, Jamal handed him the device. He tapped the three dots in the corner and looked for the app info. It hadn't looked right when Jamal opened it.

The logo, a cupcake had little 1s and 0s coming out the top, and the loading animation was of a pastry growing to monstrous proportions, which Lewis naturally concluded should not be part of ChatGPT.

App Name: ChatGPT - Chat with the Giant Pastry Team

App Description: Make your own giant pastries with our own specially trained AI.

The recipe generated started with requisitioning two metric tonnes of sugar and flour respectively, and Lewis felt a migraine take hold.

Time to follow procedure.

Lewis took out his MET issued device and opened Applaude, their internal judicial AI, and told it everything. Then he uploaded pictures of Jamal, the toppled cake, the body, plus their basic information and timeline, and asked, "Is he guilty?"

The app churned away, a dozen cores in a York data center crunched the data, while consuming the drinking water and electricity of a small household, before fourteen minutes later delivering its verdict.

Suspect: Guilty.

Sentence: Execution.

Tokens Used: 14327

Cost: 1406 GBP

Case Closed…