A Look at ChatGPT

I remember back in my University days there was a website where you could enter the name of a person or organization and it would instantly spit out a convincing sounding essay about how bad that person or organization was, using lots of impressive sounding words. In reality, it was just a bunch of generic statements and the essay was always the same aside from the name.

There has been a lot of buzz about an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program called ChatGPT. For those not familiar with it, ChatGPT is impressive to put it mildly. It can instantly provide answers to complicated questions in many different ways on just about any subject you can think of. For example, I asked it to write a blog post for a home inspector in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is the place we call home. On the surface this sounds like a great answer that makes this blog potentially obsolete but let’s take a closer look: 

This sounds like a great answer, but it highlights why a Chatbot is not a substitute for a blog written 100% by yours truly, a seasoned and Certified Professional Inspector and most importantly someone who is an actual living, breathing human being who has been in attic spaces and taken off electrical panel covers! I have noticed much of what we see on the internet lately is written by bots (home inspection related content being no exception), with the goal of getting to the top of search engine rankings (called SEO or search engine optimization) instead of sharing quality content. 

The most obvious problem with this ChatGPT response is that you could plug in "Moncton", "New York City" or "Toronto" and it would not change anything. There are some things that are incorrect or half-truths in this "blog post" so allow me to point out just a few of them: 

• You won't be able to find a licensed inspector in Halifax (or Atlantic Canada) because there are zero specific home inspector regulations and a license for home inspectors does not exist. As of 2023,  Alberta and British Columbia are the only provinces that license home inspectors. I do point out some things to look for when choosing a home inspector in a previous blog post but being licensed isn't one of them. 
• While ChatGPT is not wrong about what we look for, it isn't a simple linear examination as this answer implies. A home, especially modern homes, is a complex set of interdependent systems and requires someone who has a comprehensive or systematic way of viewing homes *cough* like me. I always mention to my clients that I tend to hop from room to room and system to system because they are often interconnected. 
• The blog post tells you that an inspector will provide information for negotiation. True, but this ignores the fact that most home inspectors have done inspections for sellers, homeowners, landlords and even on behalf of tenants and many of my clients want valuable information, not just a negotiation tool. This is especially true of first time home buyers!

Overall, this AI created blog post is mostly true and grammatically correct but it is definitely a shallow representation of why it is important to hire a home inspector. I tried asking for a few blog posts on the same subjects I have previously written about with the same result: it's a great starting point but it is in no way comparable to the knowledge an experienced home inspector has. 

Contrary to my critical tone, overall I have a strong belief in the power of AI programs such as ChatGPT to assist homeowners and provide a wealth of complex knowledge in an easy to understand format. However, being a home inspector, like many other specialized fields, requires far too much subjective judgement and detailed knowledge to be replaced by automated response bot.