How good are AI chatbots at recommending bike routes? Reassuringly awful, it seems
GUEST COLUMN
First, the good news. Ignore the alarmist hype about artificial intelligence. It is not going to ‘destroy civilisation’. Because climate change will get us first. That said, AI is clearly a big deal. It will affect life profoundly, like other paradigm-shifters such as the motor car, plastic, the internet, disc brakes and the like.
AI chatbots such as Microsoft’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard (and now, Elon Musk’s Grok) are familiar to many. In astoundingly assured English, instantly and free, they answer questions with the slick confidence of a grifter politician. Their immediate distillation of the millions of words on the subject they find online, into text of length and style you specify, is very impressive. But superficially. Because, like a populist politico on telly, it’s vague, boilerplate stuff. Worst of all, chatbots make things up and most readers won’t know truth from cobblers.
I know about cycling in East Yorkshire, where I live. So I asked ChatGPT and Bard to write some web pages, blog posts and magazine articles about it. The results were at best fuzzy, misleading and useless; at worst, utter nonsense, and actually worse than useless.
For example, both chatbots recommended York’s city walls as a must-ride. Nope. They’re medieval walkways (dating back to, er, Victorian times): physically impossible to cycle, never mind legally or practically.
Similarly, both programs suggested cycling round York city centre, not mentioning that’s not allowed during the day, when ‘Footstreets’ regs ban it. Not that you can ride up the bolt-shearingly cobbled Shambles anyway: it’s crowded with selfie-snapper tourists.
Bard thinks you can cycle round York Museum Gardens. Oh no you can’t. ChatGPT maintains you can’t cycle over the Humber Bridge. Oh yes you can: it’s the second-longest cyclable single-span bridge in the world.
About East Yorkshire generally, both were full of baloney. Bard picked out the Wolds Way as its top ‘cycle route’. Um, that’s a long-distance footpath, illegal for bikes. (It also listed the 140-mile Wolds Cycle Route – fair enough, though it claims it’s only 50 miles.)
ChatGPT blatantly made up a ‘Pocklington Canal Railway’ heritage line that takes bikes. No such thing exists. Bard suggests you rid
