Western Railroad Discussion > PSR through the eyes of AI

As I continue my exploration of AI I decided to move away from the crappy photo interpretations and move towards having a conversation with ChatGPT concerning Precision Scheduled Railroading.   AI doesn't give a hard opinion, just presents data that makes research easier and faster.  Rather than sumarize what AI spit out I share the transcript of my conversation here:

https://chatgpt.com/share/69936224-ee20-8007-8d4e-8472d170c88d

 

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

Cool stuff. 

Thought for sure the term PSR Monster would surface but nope!

Chuck 

Fascinating and helpful.  Thanks very much for this.

Does AI have a TO subscription ?

Englewood Wrote:
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> Does AI have a TO subscription ?

very good question.  About two years ago the web site was being crush with traffic to the point where it was unusable at times. We fired up additional servers and we could not meet demand. The problem was multiple AI engines were sucking all the content.  We ended up locking access out altogether to all of them except google so we would continue showing up in Google search results.  Fast forward to today and Google's AI engine has all of our content (unfortunately) while Chat GTP does not. AI does worry me because it can create a virtual railfan bot that could be like that railfan nerd that knows everything and make aspects of this site obsolete. 

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

Todd, Thanks for sharing the contents of your conversation with the AI Chat.  It was extremely interesting.

Mike Huie

You might not have seen my post from last month regarding a SNAFU I ran into with Google's search AI. Just like some of us railfan nerds that think we know everything, we're not always perfect. Clearly neither is Google...yet.

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,6129568,6129604#msg-6129604

webmaster Wrote:
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> Englewood Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Does AI have a TO subscription ?
>
> very good question.  About two years ago the web
> site was being crush with traffic to the point
> where it was unusable at times. We fired up
> additional servers and we could not meet demand.
> The problem was multiple AI engines were sucking
> all the content.  We ended up locking access out
> altogether to all of them except google so we
> would continue showing up in Google search
> results.  Fast forward to today and Google's AI
> engine has all of our content (unfortunately)
> while Chat GTP does not. AI does worry me because
> it can create a virtual railfan bot that could be
> like that railfan nerd that knows everything and
> make aspects of this site obsolete. 

RailDawg Wrote:
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> Thought for sure the term PSR Monster would
> surface but nope!

From webmaster's transcript:

Very long trains and fewer crews mean small failures propagate fast

It's my opinion that core building blocks of ChatGPT and other "AI" tools are linguistic analysis. Seems "PSR monster" might be interpreted as an editorial comment, but "very long trains" is more neutral. To me, they basically mean the same thing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/17/26 23:46 by cchan006.

broken_link Wrote:
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> Just like some of us railfan nerds that think
> we know everything, we're not always perfect.
> Clearly neither is Google...yet.
>
> https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11
> ,6129568,6129604#msg-6129604

Your link will work better if you edit out that "msg-" Otherwise, clicking on it will take you to the top of the thread, not your post near the end. Many others make the same mistake, because they simply copy and paste.

As the saying goes, "To err is human, to forgive is divine." Much of AI, including the PSR example is based on analysis of human interactions. I'm not convinced it's based on "machine intelligence" alone. I hope it continues to be imperfect, with human ability to be suspicious always in the mix. My above advice is based on my testing out links when I initially started doing that many years ago. I didn't need AI to figure it out.

By the way, thanks for posting an example of Google AI's "err."