Property AI Report
00:09:14 · Mal McCallion
[00:09:14] S0: So, so true. But yeah, no, it does feel so you know that there are so many kind of things coming together, aren't they? Sort of like moving uh moving parts. You think, well, you know, so so on the one hand we've got this crisis of you know entry-level jobs for young people, you know, nobody wants to hire them and stuff like that. We've got this big gap in you know in surveying, it's like, can somebody put those two things together, maybe? I don't know. Um, but you know, maybe people just don't wanna don't want to do it. I mean, I I I quite like going around people's houses and having you know, poke around. That feels like a great way to spend the day. And I'm sure many estate and legit agents have they probably got into the business because that is kind of actually what they really like doing. Uh but yeah, no, I I think it's um it it it's obviously gonna it's it's gonna be a worry unless they can actually do the recruitment and like you say, um it it doesn't feel like a young person's game or it hasn't certainly got the the cachet of being a young person's game, it hasn't for uh for many years. So yeah, I think there's um yeah, I can see some really funky advertising in in in all TikTok about how you can uh become a surveyor and how cool it is, um, and then hopefully start to rebuild the numbers because yeah, otherwise we we've got a big, big problem coming down the track that is a big enough problem already in delayed transactions. All right, that is our property news for this week. Let us tuck into our AI and tech news. All right, um, we're gonna start with something slightly niche, but actually quite interesting. So there is a um billionaire investor called Stanley Druckenmiller. Um, and he has written a piece um in the um uh Wall Street Journal, kind of flagging off one of his kind of mentees, right? So it's a making a point, but almost the subject is less important than the fact he openly says that he used AI to write it. And this has become a massive kind of call to arms, it seems, from everybody who absolutely hates AI writing, and particularly all the creators, obviously, is a journalist, yeah.
00:11:04 · Mal McCallion
The Wall Street Journal, that there are journalists who write for that, and they are all very many of them are very, very, very, very, very angry that the editor of the Wall Street Journal has allowed this without it seems much protection for the other journalists. Matt, this was something I know that you uh you were interested in. Um, what's what's your take?
00:11:23 · Matt Goddard
[00:11:23] S1: Well, I think it's just the the commotion it created more than anything, as you say. There's there's very few people gonna be picking up the Wall Street Journal, looking at a an op-ed about Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, and uh thinking how's how has it been written? But I think there's there's two parts to this, and it's been almost well, it has been polarising, like a lot of a lot of AI writing, which is the the Stanley Drunken Miller's sort of saying, Well, why the heck would I not be using AI to write this, given you know everything that's going on? And the uh the Wall Street Journalist editors said, Well, yeah, that that's fine. I think that the point where the other side comes in is sort of lazy journalism gets thrown around, but also it's near not even been the first draft. So a lot of the very obvious AI isms terminology and and sort of tells have been left in, so they've not even been picked up by whoever it is who you know ghost um ghostwrites these. And we were talking off yeah, exactly, and we were talking about this off air where there's certain things even turn up in in our trade press where you know it's been published by one person, but you can definitely tell by its writing style, but it's printed by someone completely different. And I know at RePIT years ago we had articles appeared in Forbes under one person's name, and it wasn't by any means the person who was appearing. It was like definitely not their tone, definitely not the style using words they would never use. So this has been around for ages, and obviously, marketing's right in your wheelhouse. You you must be aware of of how this has worked historically, and it was like people's names getting put on things. Ghostwriters for footballers' biographies. Any different to AI doing that initial pass for Drunken Miller?
00:12:56 · Mal McCallion
[00:12:56] S0: It is so true. There is this kind of like big old um almost like moral panic about like, you know, oh my god, we're using like technology to do forward-thinking things. It's like, you know, I imagine you know, but people using typewriters, right? You know, when typewriters came along, did everybody who used to handwrite stuff like, you know, throw their arms up in the air and probably did, right? And then when word processors. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, and then you know, when word processes came along and all the typists kind of lost their job that, but you know, was was that the problem on you know with paper millers and all that sort of stuff? Every single technological advance, there are people who are going to get cross and angry and stuff like that. You know, I I think it's um yeah, it's it's it's kind of getting a bit tiresome. I I do think, you know, very much in the creative community and I understand, and you know, there are a lot of people who feel under threat and all that sort of stuff, and there's there's obviously young people coming through who can't see the route to their entry-level jobs as much, should all go into surveying, obviously. I you know what what the the the other side of that is what you said, which is if you're gonna do it, do it properly. Don't just do the first thing that comes out of chat GPT and then bung it into wherever you're going. You know, tells are things like uh comma before and, okay, comma before A and D, a bit of a chat GPT thing, ashes, long dashes uh in the writing, things like that, you know, and and and just little phrases like, you know, that this is where you should focus, or things like that. Yeah, it's that there are so many in there, and as you and I spent way too much time looking at drafts of things that AI writes, and you can you can really pick up a lot of them. So yeah.
00:14:23 · Matt Goddard, Mal McCallion
[00:14:23] S1: I've just realized you're not wearing your orange top. Um, you sound a lot like AI writing and a little lot like AI pros. Is it absolutely you, or have you read so much AI slot that you're now just regurgitating the comma before and and the M dashes and such like that is exactly right, Matt. [00:14:37] S0: You've got me. No, it's because I've come all the way to Cardiff. And I just decided not to wear my MyPorter t-shirt today. But I know it is definitely me.
00:14:46 · Matt Goddard
[00:14:46] S1: It did bring me on to something else, this as well, because it's a case of, as you say, it's like people are are almost setting up, especially now with the harnesses where you can create scheduled tasks. And I'm I'm guilty of not posting them, but I've got my scheduled tasks writing a a summary of our our pod every week to then post on LinkedIn, and I often put a couple of sentences on my own nonsense first. But actually, there's there's people who you could be setting up those scheduled tasks, and you see on YouTube, don't you, videos and content are being created automatically by pipelines and of scheduled tasks that just run as and when they need to to generate things even based on triggers externally. So, you know, something's written on Pi, you can grab that, run it through your process, change it to your tone. What I'm more interested in, and I've I've seen this a two or three times from both engineers but also salespeople saying AI can't AI just writes nonsense for me or AI won't work for me. And it's because they're taking the out of the box Chat GPT or or Claude and saying, write me a LinkedIn post and then just assuming that's exactly how it is, and they're not going through the steps of getting them to review your historic content, getting its builder a builder style for you, but again, it's understanding how you would you prose. Yeah, all those things that you know I was listening to a podcast on the drive back earlier, and it was a case of there's a particular company now as an onboarding flow for Claude for their their business that actually interviews you and then helps you write this the skill to then generate your copy so it is written and your emails are drafted in your is your normal sense. So just go and it doesn't work or it hallucinates, it's like really lazy reaction. And I think that's in the same way as this. Like it was lazy for just to push it out, but it's not just Drucken Miller who's the lazy one, it's all those other people who historically would catch that the ghostwriter's done something wrong, or you know, or there's a number of failings, isn't there? It's quite an interesting debate that it's um ignited.