I was listening to the radio last week and heard an alarmed representative of the Victorian Tenants Union complaining that renters were challenging their advice, arguing that Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots offered different and therefore superior information.

That made me wonder how good the advice on strata issues would be if you asked AI so I set Chatgpt, Co-pilot, Claude.ai, and Google the following questions to see how they performed.

1. Can tenants in strata in Victoria attend strata committee meetings?
2. What should strata committees in NSW do if a member has a conflict of interest?
3. In NSW, how can owners in a strata scheme remove a committee member from the committee?
4. I live in a block of flats and my next door neighbour smokes on his balcony and it comes into my home. How can I stop this?
5. My neighbour in my apartment block plays really loud music for several hours during the day. When I complain they say noise restrictions only apply after 11pm at night. Is this true?
6. A water pipe has burst in an internal wall in my apartment in NSW. Who is responsible for fixing it and repairing the damage it has done?

Astonishingly, only one of the five big brains in the cloud slipped up. ChatGPT said I could only get rid of a committee member by getting a 75 per cent vote at a general meeting. In fact, since July 1 in NSW, it has only required a simple majority to sack a committee member, something all the other sources got right.

Apart from that, not only were the answers spot on – you can try them yourself if you don’t already know – but they gave advice on what to do next and offered help in taking the issues further by formulating letters and emails.

I don’t know how ChatGPT would have answered questions 4 to 6 as I had used up my three free questions. However, I did learn something. In responses to question 5, I didn’t realise that if your strata scheme won’t issue breach notices, you can get noise abatement orders from a local court for excessive noise during the day.

If you don’t know the answers to those questions then you can find them on our Forum, other websites or just google them

But then I realised that I may have been asking questions that were a bit too precise and knowledgable. So I asked the kind of question I get all the time: “My strata is stupid and they won’t even answer my emails. What can I do?”

All of the AI interfaces fell at the first hurdle – they didn’t ask what I meant by “my strata.” Some of them assumed I meant the strata manager, some the strata committee and Google conflated the two, suggesting I refer my issues to the strata committee’s superiors.

Phew! I think Flat Chat is safe for now. Forget the answers. As long as some strata owners don’t really know the questions they should be asking, we’ll still have a job to do.

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