The machine said twelve, it was twenty-six
AI is a wonderful tool and a poor witness. What one wrong walking time in a travel guide teaches about where to trust a machine and where not to.
When I made that Lisbon neighbourhood guide with AI, it went convincingly wrong on one point. A restaurant was listed at twelve minutes on foot. In reality it was twenty-six. The machine had not calculated it, it had copied it from an earlier guide for a different address, and presented it with full confidence.
That is the pattern to remember. A language model is fluent and self-assured, even when it knows nothing. It never sounds uncertain. The fault was not in the computing power, which is enormous, but in the ease with which it sold an assumption as a fact.
Where you do trust it
The solution was not to distrust the machine, but to anchor it. We checked every walking time against real transit data as a reference point, and only then built a model that could work out the rest. Then it was right. The machine was excellent at the work, once it had ground under its feet that it had not invented itself.
That is how you use this tool. Not as an oracle you believe, but as a craftsman’s assistant you check. The responsibility for what is true stays with you. That is not a shortcoming of the technology. It is the arrangement.