ChatGPT and Geospatial Data

GeoDirectory was delighted to recently be the host partner for a Webinar on “CHATGPT and GEOSPATIAL”
The Webinar was organised by EUROGI (European Umbrella Organisation For Geographic Information)
The Key Speakers were Alejandro Giunea de Salas – Chief Executive of Geograme Spain - and Professor Chris Bundson of The National Geocomputation Ireland.

Watch the full webinar below. 

CEO of GeoDirectory Dara Keogh welcomed all to the Webinar and briefly explained as to what the event was about.

In his welcome remarks, EUROGI Vice-President Bruce McCormack started off by giving a brief explainer as to what EUROGI is.
“Our basic mission is to promote the widespread and effective use of geospatial information and technologies in Europe”

The first person to speak was Alejandra, Guinea de Salas.
While he thinks there is enormous and exciting possibilities as to the uses for Chat GPT, it is far from the answer to everything.

He cited the example of how his father had asked it “how many dogs were in Briviesca (a region in Spain) and the CHATGPT replied that it did not know. From his research Alejandro realised “The artificial language model is not a G.I.S., it does not have access to Databases or Geographic Information and it will not make geographic analysis”.
He continued, “However it does have information on a lot of places and it does have Latitude and longitude”
He concluded his talk by stating what while CHATGPT was not a GIS, it nevertheless has a high potential for text processing and facilitating interactions with GIS.

Next up to speak was Professor Chris Bundson.
Professor Bundson started off by showing some different analysis techniques he asked CHATGPT to compute and then relayed the results he obtained.
As with our previous speaker, he outlined how there are many benefits to using CHATGPT, but also mentioned some of the downfalls.
One was when he “asked it to put together a map of Covid 19 in Ireland, it drew a blank on the URL for this website; it gave me a {web} page that used to exist, but no longer does”
He also opined that “It’s all Natural Language Processing based, therefore it has limited potential to replace a GIS directly”

Bruce McCormack when opened the Q&A session by remarking as how transformative he things A.I. will be to our lives in the future.
Amongst the Questions asked were ones asking if CHATGPT is able to discern regional language and process differences.
Another was “What are the ethical implications for using sensitive Geospatial data for modelling purposes”