AI alone just won't wash – people must be in the pipeline

The National

a day ago

I needed to spin up a very quick solution to the problem of getting 2025 tourism information in Tiree tidied up into a single usable place which was, crucially, easily updatable.
This might surprise some folks, who remain convinced that by talking about the challenges of tourism, and second homes, I am single-handedly trying to destroy the industry. Nothing could be further from the truth – the goal is to try and do tourism better, to the benefit of our communities – but that's a column for another day.
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In this instance, I am wearing my Trust comms hat, and trying to ensure that people visiting Tiree get all the information they need at their fingertips. I want to make sure that we are promoting all local businesses, and that we are clearly communicating the key things we want people to know – like how to use passing places, and when and how dogs should be controlled. This is an important part of making tourism sustainable, and beneficial. It should also give the visitor a better experience.
Getting that information out to as many people as possible seems like something that technology should be able to simplify. After all, in 2025, isn't everything solved by applying 'AI'? In short, no – but it can help if you know what you are doing.
AI doesn't know where we live. It doesn't know what is still open or not open, it has no idea about the realities of visiting an island with no cash machine and cranky crofters (I include myself in that demographic), and it has not a scooby about the vagaries of island life.
The problem of getting the details right is not one that's going to be solved by AI and it's not one that's going to be solved by guides that are based on people sucking information off the internet and turning it into a money maker. It's a problem that needs to be solved by people. We understand the difference between information and knowledge. Computers do not.
(Image: Unsplash)
A disclaimer: I am writing this before the app is launched, and in the full knowledge that I might end up with egg all over my face as the entire concept flops. Such is life.
Let's take this information guide as an example of when and how 'AI' is particularly useful. Why am I insisting on putting it in quotes? Because it is not true AI. Not even close. The AI tools we are using are just clever computer programmes with fancy names. Most of the companies producing 'AI' solutions are simply reclothing the emperor.
The emperor has had many outfits. Remember Dropbox's early days? It presented itself as seamless cloud magic, but behind the curtain, there was a bloke manually moving files between servers – a classic piece of human-powered sleight of hand. We've seen that before, and now it's happening again with AI. Take Builder.ai: once a Microsoft-backed, billion-valuation startup, it claimed its 'AI' assistant Natasha could build apps just by chatting. In reality, however, it leaned on around 700 human engineers in India to do the coding while calling it AI-powered – a textbook case of 'AI-washing'. It's not that it didn't work – it did, thanks to real people – but the magic was all in the marketing, not the algorithm.
So back to the practical side of building this thing. The island already has a very good website, but staff at the Trust find it hard to update because the backend of the website is needlessly complicated, and requires them to set aside time to refresh themselves on how to do it every time.
When it came to the data, I could have sent AI off to gather all the up-to-date details for businesses in Tiree, to scour the web for the important stuff people need to know and to compile it into a guide. But that would have been a deeply stupid course of action.
The internet is full of information about Tiree – some of it right, a lot of it not. There are business websites and social media profiles updated on an ad hoc basis, glossy magazine features with variable accuracy and out-of-date attempts at exactly what I am doing. If you want a good laugh, there's an 'AI'-written guide to Tiree that's so wildly inaccurate it's worth buying for the giggle.
(Image: Getty Images)
AI doesn't think independently. It draws conclusions from the data it's given. If that data is wrong, so are the results. In this case, the data is far from sound. We would have had to check everything anyway. So we did the data entry manually – copied content, cross-referenced with social media and filled in what we could from public sources. We did the bit AI cannot do – we verified.
Content gathering, though, was the easy part. The harder bits were organising the information and making it super simple to update. For users, it had to be laid out in a way that made sense to both visitors and the community. What do we want people to know? What are they likely to miss? What matters here, in Tiree? These are not questions AI can answer. You need to live here, or listen to the people who do. So I asked around, took advice and tried to reflect the priorities of the island. None of that could have come from a chatbot. That part still takes people. Always has.
It was the updating part that I was most interested in. If you have an office tech geek with the time to update opening hours in an inscrutable content management system, that's great but those are few and far between. Updating needed to be quick and effortless.
I asked ChatGPT how best to do it. It came up with a series of suggestions – including an app builder that runs off a spreadsheet. I had never heard of it, but I was interested. I ended up using it to build the new information app. And the whole thing does indeed run off a Google spreadsheet. To change an opening time, all anyone needs to do is update a spreadsheet cell. That's it.
In this case, AI earned its keep by giving me a quick solution I didn't know existed. It offered up an app builder that runs off a spreadsheet, and that turned out to be exactly what I needed. But it only gave the right suggestion because I already understood the 'why' and the 'who'.
The software itself also describes what it does as 'AI'. What it actually did was ask me what I wanted, suggest a suitable template and walk me through connecting a spreadsheet and mapping fields to cells. As a front-end person, databases are not my bag, so this worked really well. But let's not pretend it was thinking. It was responding to instructions.
So yes – AI helped me build an app. But the purpose, the content, the priorities? That came from here. It didn't speak to the people who live on the island, or consider what makes life easier for visitors and locals alike. I did that. The tool was helpful because the hard part – the understanding – had already been done.
Only the season will tell whether other people agree with my understanding.