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Artificial intelligence is coming to write your city’s zoning codes.
Or is it? Most people assume their town’s zoning rules are carefully tailored by educated planners to meet today’s best practices while also ensuring future buildings integrate well with the existing community. Unfortunately, that’s not really how it works in practice. The fact is that inside government offices around Cascadia, city staff are stuck enforcing rules they inherited from decades past, often having lost any explanation for the original requirements, though they continue to dictate how land can be used.
Among the worst of these regulations are parking mandates—a predetermined number of parking spaces required for every new home, business, or public building. These numbers were frequently copy-pasted from one city to the next or adopted from the average of a small number of parking studies. In Sightline’s research on parking mandates across Washington state, we found that one town could require up to nine or twelve times the number of parking spaces for the same type of building as in another.
At some point we wondered if anyone would notice a difference between parking mandates that were generated by a computer rather than by a team of degreed city planners and administrators, plus zoning boards and city councils. So we enlisted Chat GPT, one of the most popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to produce parking mandates for several building uses. We gave the system zero inputs, keeping all of our research separate from the inquiry.
Now we challenge Sightline readers to see if they can spot the AI-generated parking mandates from the real ones. A note that we edited real and AI-generated mandates for uniformity, clarity, and grammar, according to our editing standards—and to ensure you can’t spot the difference based solely on writing style.
Click on the parking mandate you think is computer-generated.
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