AI bot for AB

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JohnAKeith

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What do people think about a bot for archboston.org? I have seen it on just a few websites but I can understand its value. I know the entire subject can be controversial.

Two sites I'm thinking about are provincetown-ma.gov and MFA.org.

The official Provincetown town website has a pop-up that asks, "What can we help you find?" and you can type in anything. For example, "When is the next select board meeting" or "Where is there parking in town?" I then provides an answer and as importantly suggests additional questions you might wish to ask.

The MFA website doesn't have a bot AFAIK but awhile back I used a test account through one of the AI providers to build one that scraped the MFA website (sorry) and allowed me to test out a bit. I could type in, "When is the museum open today?" and also, "Where are the Sargents" and "Show me the Van Goghs you have in your collection". So, not a lot of heavy lifting but helpful.

Perhaps it doesn't compare well but I think there could be a benefit here. Mostly, we're a database of information and a linear news site (I can't think of the words) so perhaps there isn't a lot of overlap between different threads.

I dunno. Ideas:

"What's the history of the P3 project in Roxbury"
"What buildings are under construction at Northeastern"
"Show me the last 10 posts by UserX"

Thoughts?
 
The only usage case for an AI chatbot is "I completely lobotomized the part of my brain that has successfully used search engines for the last 28 years."

Board search works. Google works. Basic critical thinking skills when using search so you can discern whether what you're reading is machine slop...works.
 
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The AB search could use a little help but beyond that I don't think there would be a need in this limited Boston context.
 
JohnAKeith said:
Welp, people on this board still think trains are our future so .. makes sense.
Click to expand...

Let me answer this in a non reactionary way. Most of this board is made up of discussions that are primarily opinions. That means that if an LLM scrapes the board, what it will report to you if you ask it a question is not necessarily a verified news source, but rather a mix. That's the fundamental problem. Frankly, people are better off still using Google if they want to find the most up-to-date info about a project. A discussion board is a fun meeting place for like minded folks. But AI doesn't get that.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
Let me answer this in a non reactionary way. Most of this board is made up of discussions that are primarily opinions. That means that if an LLM scrapes the board, what it will report to you if you ask it a question is not necessarily a verified news source, but rather a mix. That's the fundamental problem. Frankly, people are better off still using Google if they want to find the most up-to-date info about a project. A discussion board is a fun meeting place for like minded folks. But AI doesn't get that.
Click to expand...
LLM's puke out inaccurate slop in large part due to the fact that they laser-in on places like freaking Reddit to train their models. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
 
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