My first test of AI

[gr...@hawkmount.com]

Hi group,

I don't post very often but I do read most of the post here. I'm 75 years old fairly computer literate and decided to try AI for the first time this evening and I thought you might be interested.

This was my prompt, just testing it to see what it would do not trying to be significant, but I was very impressed with the result.

"write a short history of why the trams were removed from the streets of Sydney New South Wales in Australia”

This was the response:

The removal of trams from the streets of Sydney, New South Wales, is a story tied to urban development, technological advancements, and shifting transportation priorities. The tram network in Sydney began in the late 19th century, with horse-drawn trams introduced in the 1860s, followed by electric trams in the 1890s. By the early 20th century, Sydney had one of the largest and most extensive tram systems in the world.

However, the decline of the tram network began in the mid-20th century. Several factors contributed to the decision to phase out trams:

1. Rise of the Automobile: After World War II, car ownership surged, and with it, the growing preference for private transportation. The expansion of roads and the increasing availability of cars led to a decline in tram usage.

2. Suburbanization: As Sydney expanded outward, with the development of new suburbs, public transportation systems had to adapt. The tram system, which primarily served the inner city and some nearby areas, became less suited to the needs of a sprawling, car-dominated city.

3. Political and Business Interests: In the 1940s and 1950s, there was strong lobbying from the motor vehicle industry and certain local businesses to replace trams with buses. Buses were seen as more flexible, cheaper to operate, and less reliant on fixed infrastructure like tram tracks. There were also financial pressures and a belief that buses could better meet the growing demands of Sydney's suburban expansion.

4. Costs of Maintenance and Upgrades: Maintaining and upgrading the tram infrastructure was seen as costly, especially when compared to the perceived benefits of buses, which could use existing roads.

The final decision to remove trams was made in the 1950s, and the last tram ran in 1961. The network was replaced with buses, which were seen as more cost-effective and adaptable to the needs of a modern, car-oriented city. Despite this, many people regret the loss of trams, and there have been ongoing discussions about reinstating tram services, with some parts of Sydney now reintroducing light rail systems.

The removal of trams remains a significant moment in the history of Sydney’s urban transport and development.

Your thoughts would be very interesting, I'm guessing!

[John C Google]

Hi Greg

It sounds very much like my introduction in the book 'Tracks - South East.' The story of Sydney's south eastern tramway. Quoted by AI! Fascinating!

John Cowper

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[billbolt...@gmail.com]

It is a mish-mash of fairly generic information about why trams systems in many places were abandoned, and is only very loosely related to what actually occurred in Sydney, with just enough statements key dates etc to make it seem localised.

This illustrates a major issue with "retail" AIs.... they have access to a huge data sets but are quite poor of assessing the quality of the data, and its evidentiary value in terms of the question asked. 

Cheers,

Bill

[David Critchley]

Hey group,  

AI is certainly an interesting beast.  To say it is 'intelligent' is probably more fantasy than fact, but that being said it is certainly a helpful tool.  As John Cowper alluded to; the response is very similar to some of his work in his book on the new SLR lines.   This is because AI, in very simple terms, scours the internet for 'answers' that best fit the question or activity requested.  One of the big issues with AI is that it often does not provide sources, although it is getting better at that - I asked a question of AI a few weeks ago regarding tramcar safety and it gave me a excerpt from the Sydney Tramway Museum's Safety Management System (SMS) which is online but supposedly password protected!

As teachers, we have struggled with students using AI for a couple of years now, but it's there and we now have to accept it.  However, we recommend to our students (and probably importantly for anyone on here is writing about tramways) that if they are going to use AI, then always treat it as general information, not specific.   Therefore it should be considered as a draft and you need to re-write it/proof read it before you use it for publishing.  You also need to check sources and cite them where neccessary and always check spelling as AI uses the American spelling conventions.   

David Critchley

(Not written using AI)

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[Matthew Geier]

On 3/4/25 12:15, 'David Critchley' via TramsDownUnder wrote:

Hey group,  

AI is certainly an interesting beast.  To say it is 'intelligent' is probably more fantasy than fact, but that being said it is certainly a helpful tool.  As John Cowper alluded to; the response is very similar to some of his work in his book on the new SLR lines.   This is because AI, in very simple terms, scours the internet for 'answers' that best fit the question or activity requested.

Remember that 'LLM' 'AI' is a statistical beast - it's just hovered up every bit of information it can find and just generates an answer statistically. A wildly incorrect piece of information that has been quoted multiple times with out any real checking will be weighted better than the sole properly researched correct information - as the wrong answer was seen multiple times and the correct one fewer or even only once.

And the citation problem is sort of baked in, the LLMs basically work by sucking down enormous amounts of information, actually citing it all would result in a list of citations many times larger than the actual information part of the response.

Any decent human researcher keeps copious notes of sources and should be able to cite sources and often have to make value judgements on the accuracy of those sources.

This has happened even locally in our hobby - SPER's freight car 24s - the number of people who said 'will never run, doesn’t have motors' was considerable. Multiple people reported 'but it doesn't have motors' when discussion of operating it came up. Few actually went down and looked under the car - which if they had, they would have seen the rather unique bogies did in fact have motors.....