How is Artificial Intelligence going to change the building sector?

You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT as it has been all over the media recently. I usually find that chatbots, those website pop ups that purport to be there to assist you, actually tend to be more frustrating than helpful. I invariably end up abusing them in some forlorn hope that there’s a human paying attention to their interactions and who will recognise that the bot isn’t helping. I have to say, though, that ChatGPT is clearly a level above these.

Here is how ChatGPT responded to my query about technology use in the construction sector:

A very impressive, well-reasoned and comprehensive answer with a robust plan of action.

While the answer is a little lacking in imagination, I’m sure that if the industry followed this plan, it would work.

I have been learning more about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the team at YourQS have been investigating the potential application of it in our processes. AI is a software technology that absorbs large amounts of information, is taught to analyse it to spot patterns, then infer answers from these patterns.

We have learnt that the “taught part” is a primary challenge with AI.

Our first attempt to use AI was to help match our product item records to merchant codes (e.g., PlaceMakers, Carters, Bunnings). This is a very timeconsuming process that requires a person with solid product knowledge to match our description to the merchant terminology, which often involves brand names and abbreviations.

Our Master’s research project with the Wellington Institute of Technology and Callaghan Innovation found that the time taken to train the AI was about the same as doing the matching.

This means AI is great on huge scale problems, yet perhaps not so helpful on very specific applications.

This is where ChatGPT is ground-breaking compared to other AI technologies. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, have spent a fortune training it so that it works out of the box.

This doesn’t, however, mean it is going to always be right. Here is another one of my interactions with ChatGPT when I wondered if my neighbour’s son, whose surname is Yamamoto, could be related to the WWII General of that name: Credible it seems, but I wanted to know about Japan, so I refined my query to be more specific:

I realised that I had made a typo so tried again:

So according to ChatGPT’s credible sounding answers, Yamamoto is in the top 10, 40 or 50 most common names. (According to Wikipedia. it is the 9th most common – credible since Wikipedia is moderated by multiple humans.)

ChatGPT does learn, though. This was a recent post on LinkedIn:

But when I try a similar query, this is the response:

While AI is impressive, I believe it is an aid to human decision making, not a substitute for it. No one yet knows what is in the future for AI, so in the meantime, we’ll continue with our research (and avoid pitting our partners against chatbots, for our own wellbeing).