Everyday items for the practical nerd.

The gorgeous book cover you see on your right is the most recent edition of Hardie Grant’s _Explore Australia_ : a massive tome of sights and highlights all around Australia for anyone planning an epic road trip. The reason it’s here? I was the editor and researcher for this book, for a job that took many weeks late last year. #### Lessons Learned Among the things I learned while working on the book (which includes a list of charming country towns it would be fun to visit) is that it’s vital, in the current techno environment, to check, cross-check, and check again any search results that are labelled as an AI summary. I am not a fan of AI in the creative fields and was not in fact trying to use AI in any way – but Google now provides such results at the top of any list. Although I’d field past it looking for actual website results, its looming presence did at least give me the opportunity to see at a glance how reliable it was at producing accurate information. Reader, it does not. #### Unreliable AI results Frequently the AI summary would tell me certain places, attractions and businesses did not exist when I knew for a fact that they did. Or they’d say they did exist when they’d ceased to operate several years before. Sometimes the summary contained contradictory information or “facts” that turned out to not appear on any of the actual sources. Because AI doesn’t give weight to either the date of retrieved information or the reliability of the source, the summary would often claim something existed simply because a website, six years ago, suggested a council/business was thinking of opening (or closing) something, or had changed its name. The AI approach was particularly unreliable in the case of checking the existence of events (like farmers markets) or attractions (like local museums) run by volunteers, where information is available mainly on social media and may be outdated, abandoned, moved to a new site or different platform, or otherwise existing in a dusty web-based oubliette. #### Mitigating the AI ‘hallucinations’ The best use of those AI results were to make me aware that every online suggestion had to be triple checked to ensure the subject currently existed with the latest website, phone numbers, dates and other details. I made a lot of phone calls, cross-checked results across multiple platforms to ensure they were still in use, and generally never took a search result for granted. The workload to produce a guide book that was comprehensive, accurate and useful was intense, but I’m very proud of the result. Everything listed in every state was open and operating at the time of research, verified by human endeavour. I also wrote the overall introduction and the round-up opening paragraphs for every state/territory, which I enjoyed immensely. Creative work always delights me! #### Road Trip!! If you’re thinking of taking to the road to discover more of our beautiful country, take a look at _Explore Australia_ to plan a fantastic road trip – or you can just look at some stunning pictures, some thoroughly updated text, and daydream your travels from your comfy armchair. * * * ### Discover more from Narrelle Harris: Writer & Editor Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe ### Share this: * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Like Loading... ### _Related_