Comment by fakedang
12 hours ago
Honestly this is a very nitpicky argument. The issue for site contractors is not with manually checking each entry to ensure it's correct or not. It's writing the stuff down in the first place.
I'm exploring a similar but unrelated use case for generative AI, and in discovery interviews, what I learnt was that site contractors and engineers do not request or expect 100% accuracy, and leave adequate room for doubt. For them, it's the hours and hours of manually writing down a TON of paperwork, which in some industries is often months and months of work written by some of the poorest communicators on the planet. Because these tasks end up consuming so much time, they forgo the correct methodology and some even tend to fill up some reports with random bullshit just so that the project moves forward - in most cases, this writing work is done for liability concerns as mentioned above, rather than for the purposes of someone actually going through it. If the writing part is cleared for many of these guys, most wouldn't have a problem with the reading and correcting part.
It's unclear how filling reports with "random bullshit" will protect anyone from liability... It seems you're saying that the current situation is so bad that anything different would be an improvement, and less-random bs is better than outright bs.
I'm sorry if my comment came across as nitpicky; it's just that every time I try to do some actual work with LLMs (that's not pure creativity, where hallucination is a feature) it never follows prompts exactly, and goes fast off the rails. In the context of construction work, that sounded dangerous. But happy to be proved wrong.
> It's unclear how filling reports with "random bullshit" will protect anyone from liability... It seems you're saying that the current situation is so bad that anything different would be an improvement, and less-random bs is better than outright bs.
Exactly. Oftentimes reports are filled with nonsensical documentation that are only discovered during the discovery process of litigation after a disaster has already happened. For example, from a real safety report at a chemicals facility, there was an instance of a report stating that under high valve pressure "many bad things will happen". Not joking, literally quoted verbatim.
Most companies' legal teams would love to have their engineers write proper documents and most engineers would love to not spend time on documentation. GenAI can fill that gap by at least giving a baseline starting point which can be edited further for a fraction of the time than writing from scratch.
Totally agree! That's what we've observed, as well.