We held a lively interactive meeting on the subject of Artificial Intelligence on 30th April, which was recorded. Our first speaker, Richard Farthing, covered the background and some relevant uses, not only of well-known ‘chatbots’ such as ChatGPT, but also applications that use AI in the background, and real-world examples, particularly around planning. The second half was a full-on interactive session led by John Myers, who tested out several audience questions on live AI services, ranging from planning to creating images.

We naturally chose AI – in the form of Claude.ai – to generate the 1200 word report on the event page, alongside the two videos, and slides, with clickable links allowing you to explore the references mentioned, including the original AI ‘chats’. For comparison, we used both Claude and Google’s Gemini for shorter 300 word summaries below.  In this case Gemini made a bullet-point style summary as you can see, but Claude extracted perhaps a little more detail. Do we need a tool to merge the best of both ? It turns out that there are several tools already available to at least automate side-by-side comparisons.

Claude 300 word summary

AI: A Powerful New Tool for Civic Societies

Richard gave an illustrated introduction to AI, explaining how today’s large language models work and demonstrating their capabilities live. He showed how AI tools can summarise vast planning documents in seconds — a boon for societies grappling with complex applications running to hundreds of files — and introduced specialist tools including Objector.ai, which analyses planning legislation to assess whether there are grounds for objection, and Anti-Render, which produces more realistic versions of developers’ glossy CGI images. He also demonstrated how AI can help check whether images used on websites may infringe copyright.

Richard flagged some important cautions too: AI chatbots can generate plausible but inaccurate information, automated bots are already trawling civic society websites for copyright infringements, and the longer-term societal implications of AI — from job displacement to autonomous weapons — deserve serious attention.

John Myers took a more hands-on approach, taking questions and demonstrating AI tools in real time. He showed how an LLM can quickly locate planning policies, draft consultation responses, and synthesise multiple documents — tasks that would previously have taken hours. A member, Sophie, described how she had built a complete website for a residents’ association using Claude, with no coding background, at minimal cost — a practical example that impressed the room.

Key practical tips from the evening: always give AI as much context as possible about your organisation and local situation; ask the AI to plan before it acts; and always check what it produces before publishing or submitting. On data security, members were advised to avoid uploading personal information and to delete audio recordings and transcripts once minutes have been generated.

The message was clear: AI is already a powerful tool for civic advocacy, and societies that learn to use it well will be better placed to make their voice heard.

Gemini 300 word summary

Empowering Civic Societies with AI

The session highlighted that AI’s greatest strength for societies is in making summaries. Whether dealing with a 119-condition planning application or a dense 800-page developer report, AI tools like Claude and Gemini can extract key issues in seconds, allowing volunteers to focus on strategy rather than “turgid” reading.

Beyond text, the meeting showcased how AI can:

• Defend against copyright claims: By using reverse image searches like TinEye to avoid “trap” images on websites.

• Bridge the volunteer gap: One member shared how she built a complete, professional website for her residents’ association using AI, despite having no coding background.

• Draft Consultations: AI can take a society’s core principles and draft a formal response to government consultations, such as those on planning fees or public house protections.

A Human-Led Future

The speakers emphasised that while AI is an “intergalactic autocomplete,” it lacks a “soul” and local knowledge. The consensus was clear: civic societies should not fear the technology but should use it to level the playing field against well-resourced developers. As John Myers noted, the goal is to “equip ourselves to fight the battle” by combining human passion with machine efficiency.

Members are encouraged to experiment with free versions of these tools but to remain vigilant regarding security—always ensuring that personal data is never uploaded and transcripts of private meetings are deleted once minutes are finalised.

We held a lively meeting last week, chaired by Michael Bach (pictured), examining the many issues around high streets and the night time economy. We had four expert speakers, and a significant number of audience questions.

For the first time, we video-recorded the event. The video and audio recordings are posted on the event page.  We used AI to generate a summary, plus an even shorter summary here. If you’d like to discover how we did this, please book for our AI talk at the end of April, where we’ll cover this amongst other topics.

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 showed that with a little knowledge, illustrated with examples, AI can bolster your resources in several useful ways, without necessarily spending a penny. 

Agenda

We looked 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 looked at the background to give context to the front runners in the general purpose ‘chatbot’ race, classed as ‘Generative AI’ based on Large Language Models (LLM’s), following up with some examples, to show where the AI chatbots can help and where they’re going.

The second part of the meeting was entirely interactive, with John taking a number of audience questions and then showing how one might ask various AI chatbots for the answers.

Meeting report 

This was, of course, generated by AI (Claude), based on a transcript, also generated by AI (Turboscribe).

Part One: An Overview of AI — Richard Farthing

A copy of the slides are provided here – they include highlighted clickable links allowing you to explore the references mentioned: AI Presentation

Richard introduced himself as a chartered engineer with a background in major infrastructure projects, and as the trustee responsible for running the London Forum website. Drawing on a prepared set of slides, he offered an accessible survey of the AI landscape.

He opened by explaining what AI chatbots actually are. The acronym GPT — Generative Pre-trained Transformer — describes systems trained on vast quantities of internet text that generate responses by calculating the statistically most probable next word. Professor Hannah Fry’s description of these systems as a “highly sophisticated intergalactic autocomplete” was offered as a useful shorthand. The first chatbot, Eliza, was demonstrated live in its original 1966 form, underlining how the field has evolved from primitive pattern-matching to today’s powerful large language models (LLMs). Richard noted that the pace of change has been extraordinary: tools that were “relatively crude” just three years ago have advanced beyond recognition.

Richard surveyed the major AI companies and products — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google DeepMind, whose origins are nearby in London) — and tested each against the Hammersmith Society’s website to compare their summarising abilities. Gemini produced the most accurate and comprehensive result on the day, even locating the society’s bank balance from public documents, though Richard cautioned that the models are constantly leapfrogging one another in capability.

He flagged the significant energy consumption of large AI systems — ChatGPT is estimated to use around 1,000 gigawatt hours per year — but noted that more efficient, task-specific models are being developed. A planning-specific AI being trialled in Cambridge and Greenwich, developed with Liverpool University, ran on a standard PC and was able to process 300 consultation responses in 16 minutes (compared to 18 hours of officer time), with the additional advantage of having no institutional bias.

A substantial part of Richard’s presentation was devoted to practical applications directly relevant to civic society work. He highlighted the use of AI for summarising large planning documents — the Earl’s Court development, for instance, generated some 800 documents — and demonstrated this live using Claude to produce a two-page summary of the Planning in London publication, complete with a table of contents, for the Forum’s website. He also introduced two specialist tools: Objector.ai, which analyses planning legislation and can help assess whether there are grounds for objection, and Anti-Render, which converts developers’ CGI images into more realistic depictions accounting for British weather and conditions.

On the subject of AI-generated imagery, Richard demonstrated how ChatGPT can generate images from a prompt, showing a summer party photograph transformed into a Christmas party image, and how it produced a jigsaw-puzzle graphic representing statutory planning consultees without needing to be told who those consultees were. He also addressed the risk of unwittingly using copyrighted images, recommending the reverse image search tool TinEye and showing how images can be extracted from PDFs for checking before publication.

Richard discussed the risks associated with AI more broadly. He touched on the concept of “PDoom” — the probability of existential harm from AI — noting real-world incidents including a young man whose AI companion encouraged criminal behaviour. He also raised concerns about autonomous weapons systems and the potential for AI “agents” that act on a user’s behalf without direct instruction. On a more prosaic level, he warned that automated copyright-enforcement bots are already scanning civic society websites, making vigilance around image use essential.
He closed by highlighting the concept of “vibe coding” — using AI to write software in plain English rather than a programming language — and suggested that AI-powered agents capable of performing tasks autonomously represent the likely next phase of development.

Part Two: AI in Practice — John Myers

John Myers, also a London Forum trustee and trustee of the Camden Society, led a more discursive second session, taking questions and demonstrating AI tools live. He prefaced his remarks with three practical principles: always ask the AI how to do something before attempting it yourself; ask the AI to make a plan before tackling a complex task; and give the AI as much context as possible about your organisation, your local area, and the personalities involved.

John demonstrated the use of Gemini to locate planning policy on public houses, quickly finding the relevant London Plan policy (HC7) and the corresponding National Planning Policy Framework wording revised in December 2024. He showed how any consultation document — including a live example on planning fees — can be fed to an LLM to generate a first draft response, which can then be refined and checked. He emphasised strongly that human oversight remains essential: civic societies must understand and stand behind what they submit, and should not simply allow machines to talk to machines unchecked.

The session ranged across a number of practical topics raised by members. On meeting minutes, John endorsed the use of AI transcription tools such as Granola and Otter, recommending the practice of recording a meeting, generating a transcript, producing minutes from it, and then deleting both the recording and transcript to minimise security and data protection risks. He urged societies not to publish sensitive information in publicly accessible minutes.

On the question of synthesising multiple consultation responses, John demonstrated how Claude can take a society’s own draft alongside responses from other bodies and, with appropriate context about the society’s priorities, suggest improvements and additions — a significant time-saver for groups with limited capacity.

A highlight of the session was a contribution from a member, Sophie, who described how she had used Claude to build a complete website for a residents’ association from scratch, with no prior coding experience. Using Claude Code and then uploading to GitHub (both free or low-cost services), she had produced a professional-looking site, capable of being updated in minutes. John commended this as a model for smaller societies struggling to recruit technical volunteers.

On security and data protection, John advised uploading only public documents or documents free of personal data, and recommended against giving AI tools access to personal email accounts or sensitive internal communications. He noted that he trusts Claude’s parent company, Anthropic, as he would any responsible institution, but acknowledged that caution is warranted with less well-known providers.

The meeting closed with a brief discussion of social media, with John suggesting that AI can now be set to scan for news of relevance to a society, draft tweets, and in some cases post them directly — greatly reducing the manual burden of maintaining an active online presence. He also noted that Grok (xAI), despite reservations about its ownership, can be useful for accessing real-time information, while OpenStreetMap data offers a route to creating copyright-free maps.

The chair thanked both speakers and encouraged members to take what they had learned back to their own societies.

We’ve long had an effective search facility on the website for current news, Insights, events and other pages.  Last week there was an opportune moment to invest in an important additional feature to support our institutional knowledge: Search for our archive of several hundred pdf files

This is significant, in that the entire archive is now indexed and searchable, most notably ‘What We’ve said‘ since 2011, all reports and pdf attachments, plus historic editions of Insights and NewsForum.

If you’re researching particular subject in our field, there’s a good chance we’ve said something useful about it. The available search facilities are best summarised on the updated Resources page. 

Did you know? There’s a search option at the top of every page: on desktops just to the right of the menu – the little magnifying glass 🔍︎ symbol – and on mobiles & tablets, the search box is always visible at the top of the screen. Search boxes like this appear next to document archives. Note that there’s a ‘live search’ preview as you type.

Search results are ordered by most relevant (number of matches to search terms), with priority given to recent publications, but there are a myriad of options we could choose. Try it by clicking on this search for Tall Buildings, and let us have your feedback.:

https://www.londonforum.org.uk/?s=tall+buildings 

The Forum’s Membership Services Committee (MSC) is looking for volunteers to help with activities, including organising events, producing news and Insights editorial, and communicating with the membership. Is this you?  Please contact the secretary and let us know how you can help.

Tony Travers, Visiting Professor in the LSE Department of Government, Associate Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy, Director of LSE London and Patron of London Forum of Amenity and Civic Societies was awarded in the King’s New Year Honours a CBE for Services to Economics and to Public Service.

Congratulations to Tony for this well deserved honour.

You can book for our open meeting on 29th January to hear Tony’s comments on ‘Densifying the suburbs’.

There are many public sources of articles, reports and publications that could be important to London Forum’s members to help awareness of policy changes and activity of Government and GLA departments. The information could be useful for the way societies work with their local authority and their MP.

To help you, we’ve created a Resources website menu with links to useful research resources on the Internet, as well as to relevant London Forum material, including the Find Your Local Society page with its new map, and the ‘What We’ve Said‘ archive.

If you have a suggestion for an addition or update on sources of information, please contact us.

We’ve added a new interactive member map to appropriate web pages, based on membership data provided by societies. Try it out live here (the image in this article is necessarily a static screenshot for publication).  You can zoom in, and click on any of the blobs representing societies – the size of which represents membership – and review the data we show, including clickable links to member websites – example illustrated.

If you spot errors in location (an approximation in a handful of cases), or the membership information, please let us know.  The membership comprises 108 member societies, with a combined membership of over 57,000.