War of the AI NIMBY bots (I am furious!)
“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
— H. G. Wells (1898), The War of the Worlds
These prophetic words sent an ice-cold chill down my spine this week when I came across a website… planningobjection dot com
And I quote for you: “Our Planning AI writes persuasive, policy-centered objection letters to development proposals you want to object to - in just a few clicks, for a fraction of the cost of a planning consultant… We use sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to review the planning application you wish to object to. We cross-reference it with your Local Council's Local Plan, and instantly construct a comprehensive and reasoned objection grounded in planning policy. All you need to do is select the jurisdiction of the planning application, input the reference number, and if desired, add specific issues you want addressed. You will receive your detailed objection letter within 24 hours.”
The website then takes you through some easy steps… you bang in the application number, the Council, tick a few boxes et voila! You have an objection letter written by a robot.
The website then also says: “Although we are confident our objection letters will dramatically help strengthen the case for refusing the planning application, the ultimate decision is up to the Planning Officers. What we do know, is that the more objections that a council receives, the stronger the case for rejecting the application. So share planningobjection dot com with your friends and neighbours and take decisive community action against development.”
I am incandescent! A NIMBY is by definition someone who doesn’t want external influence of effects on their lives. The number of times I have heard the argument “you don’t live here, it won’t affect you” and “you don’t care about us” and “you come in from outside and don’t know anything about us and tell us what is best for our communities”.
Yet here we are, they can’t actually string a coherent reason together of why they object, they just do because they are just a bunch of miserable NIMBYs. So, now they can turn to AI to do their thinking for them.
Then there is the insult to humans. The planners, architects, strings of consultants, planning policy officers, planning officers, councillors AND THE FUTURE GENERATIONS that they are treating with such utter contempt… they deploy their artificial intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic… and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
In the academic world, every piece of written material is now subjected to an AI test to ensure it was a human who wrote it and if it is found to be AI it is an automatic fail. Every objection lodged against a planning application one of our clients work on will now be subjected to an FOI “is this an AI bot or a human” and if it is an AI bot, I want it removed.
Henry