This local contractor used ChatGPT to write inspection reports

I do building inspections for a firm in Portland and last month I was reviewing a report from a subcontractor that sounded like a robot wrote it. Every sentence was perfectly structured but it described the wrong type of foundation for a house I knew was on a slab. I called him out on it and he admitted he fed the job notes into an AI and never read the output. If you use these tools to save time you still have to verify the details yourself. Has anyone else run into fake sounding reports from AI generated content?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan21117d ago

My cousin's roofing crew in Seattle got called out by the city inspector last spring because their report claimed they installed 3/4 inch plywood over a garage roof, but the actual building code there only allows 5/8 inch. The foreman had just copied the notes into an AI and it changed the thickness to match some generic template. He had to redo the entire roof at his own cost because the report became part of the permit record. So it's not just about sounding fake, it can mess with legal stuff like permits and insurance if the numbers or specs get changed without anyone catching it.

thomas_young17d ago

Oh man, that's a nightmare. I was actually reading an article last week about a similar thing happening with an electrical contractor down in Texas where the AI rewired a panel layout in the report and it didn't match real world code. The whole thing about these tools is they don't know what's legal or safe, they just guess based on what they've seen online. Your cousin's foreman probably thought he was saving time but that's a costly mistake, especially since the permit record is basically a legal document once it's filed. I think I read somewhere that some inspection offices are starting to flag AI generated reports just because of these kind of errors, so honestly it's a double whammy of looking sloppy and potentially getting you in real trouble.