AI presents an enormous opportunity for us to work more quickly and create value. I’ve been using it on and off and find that while it is not always entirely accurate, it does help with giving us a good starting point.
On this particular occasion, I’ve been looking at GB11 of our December Council meeting and the staff recommendation to propose minimum lot sizes of 955 sqm for Dual Occupancies across the LGA (as compared to the State Government default of 400 sqm).
According to the AI output – which may not be entirely accurate – our Sydney metro councils offer minimum lot sizes per two homes ranging from 450 sqm (Waverley) to 600 sqm (Hornsby, Northern Beaches, Liverpool, Fairfield). So you can imagine how the Department of Planning will respond if Ku-ring-gai were to go ahead with the proposal in its current form.
In my view it’s helpful to see AI like a junior that you employ at your business. Their work may not necessarily be the most reliable or intuitive, but it gives you a good starting point to further interrogate and refine. You can see through my chat with Claude that I’ve been doing just that.
The benefit of AI over a junior, however, is the price and speed of output. If I had employed a junior to do this it may have taken hours or even days, plus hundreds of dollars. But my chat with Claude here only took a few minutes at a fraction of that cost. How reliable is the data? For someone who knows the topic really well there are likely flaws in the answer, but there will also be flaws when you employ a junior as well. That?s where some sensible scrutiny and subsequent fact checking comes in place before you place reliance on it for anything mission critical.
