Tom Loosemore

I just read an excellent article by James O’Malley looking under the bonnet of the UK Government’s recent work using AI to improve the planning process. The works is making excellent use of LLMs (plural) to solve nicely focused problems. James’s article is well worth 7 minutes of your time.

One worry? Were I to put my mind to the grift, I could easily build a subscription service that would allow anyone to automatically write and send a well-founded and superbly researched objection to any planning application within half a mile of their property.

And the research for each objection would use a better LLM than government is itself applying here. Given the current planning rules, this is government entering an AI arms race against its own citizens. And I foresee some JRs painfully lost.

The end game has to be that the planning rules – or indeed the whole approach to planning – will have to change.

Have a look at Objector[dot]ai for a grift-adjacent carbuncle which is already using Google Adwords to pollute the search results for ‘planning objection’. But as grift goes, it’s kinda sweetly amateurish. A proper grifter would be charging £9.99/mth for a totally automated version that objected to literally everything and anything nearby…