Artificial Intelligence is everywhere in the news and in business these days – we even used it to generate the image for this event. How can it help your civic society ?  Do you need to be an expert? (No!)  Civic societies are often under-resourced, and at this event we’ll show that with a little knowledge, illustrated with examples, AI can bolster your resources in several useful ways, without necessarily spending a penny. Please book here.

Agenda

Firstly by way of introduction, we’ll look at some novel pre-built applications and services that use AI behind the scenes as their main way to allow you to:

• Produce notes and minutes of meetings;
• Find sources of images to avoid potential copyright infringement;
• Create crafted objections to planning applications.

We’ll look at some background to give context to the front runners in the general purpose ‘chatbot’ race, classed as ‘Generative AI’ based on Large Language Models, following up with some examples, to show where the AI chatbots can help and where they’re going.  Along the way, we’ll peek under the hood, to look at:

• How ChatGPT “thinks”, and why Prof. Hannah Fry recently described such AI chatbots as “a highly sophisticated intergalactic autocomplete!”
• ChatGP, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s ‘Claude’. What’s each good at ?
• Just so you can recognise it when you see it, we’ll touch on so called ‘Agentic AI’, taking the above ‘chatbot assistants’ a step further moving them into being ‘operators’, now used in call centres, self-driving cars, or more general examples such as OpenClaw or Microsoft CoPilot Studio allowing users to build agents that interact with data, emails, and calendars.

We’ll take a quick look at government involvement in the ‘AI arms race’, and how Liverpool University is working with the MHCLG and an LPA to create an AI model to help them analyse large numbers of objections, supporting letters and emails.

Using the chat-bots, we’ll walk through examples of how you might:

Christmas in the gallery

Statutory Consultees

• Summarise large (planning) documents;
• Create or transform images, such as these, recently created for London Forum;
• Make suggestions on how a proposed change policy might change the outcomes on various kinds of development proposals;
• Suggest improvements to a proposed policy to achieve specified goals;
• Consider how the existing national and local policies apply to a specific development proposal.

Speakers

Two of your London Forum trustees have been actively using AI for a while to support the Forum’s work – and in their other lives – they’ll guide you.

Richard Farthing is a new trustee who now runs the London Forum website and comms, amongst other interests. He uses AI for lots of techy, and not so techy stuff, such as creating the images above.

John Myers is a trustee and former Secretary of the London Forum. He uses AI for research on planning and other policy matters, drafting documents, and general advice on a broad range of topics.

We plan to make the event partly interactive – please bring a question that we can address and discuss in our Q&A.

Refreshments and chat from 6pm. This is a members-only event – free to attend for our usual maximum of three per society – please book below, so that we know how many to expect.