While building the new version of this website, we had a lot of tedious tasks that we gladly wanted to outsource to Artificial Intelligence (AI) tooling like ChatGPT. This was true both for the technical side (Nan plans to do a full reveal there in a future blog) and for the content. For the latter, it was my first time seriously working with AI tooling. This is what I found.

Member since

When you look at the Community Page, you see an option to sort by “Joined”. It will show you the community members in order of when they signed up. This is a new feature.

We only actively started registering the sign-up date in 2017, so we had to gather additional data to give credit to the hundreds of early users who have been with us since around 2005. We used ChatGPT to create a script to crawl through all the old community index pages in the Wayback Machine to see where the first occurrence of a member's name was.

It ended up with a pretty good list – the dates may be off by 3 months or so, but the order is fairly correct. I carefully screened the earliest bunch, also using the IDs in our database for that. Still, AI had been of good use as it could work much faster than I could.

Below is the Class of December 2025, the group of First Joiners who are still listed as active members:

Country pages

The country pages have had a major makeover in general, and there was some space at the top of the page to put an introduction text. Now, we’ve had introductions to the country pages, written by me, ages ago – and these were bad! It is just hard to say something valuable for nearly 200 countries.

What I wanted this time was:

1. Provide a general introduction to the country’s approach to the World Heritage Convention and nominating WHS.
2. Show a summary of notable aspects about travelling to the WHS in the country, gathered from our reviews and our forum pages.

So I turned to ChatGPT with my questions (as I had so many questions, I had to get the paid subscription for a month).

Well, #2 turned out to be too much to ask. Even when I nudged it towards the correct pages to look at, telling it only to look within the worldheritagesite.org domain, it did not do that consistently so and kept mixing in lame opinions from Reddit or personal websites.

Maybe leave it at #1 for now, then. I wanted it to include the date of ratification of the WH Convention. Although shown in a neat list on the official UNESCO website, my buddy Chat had trouble doing it correctly. It was adamant that Kuwait ratified in 1968, although the convention was created only in 1972. Here, also, the mixing of different, less reliable sources was the main issue. In the end, I fact-checked all ratification dates (they were about 90% correct).

Where it did better was creating an introduction paragraph for each country. OK, it’s not greatly insightful prose, but good enough for a first look at a certain country. It would have taken me ages to write those.

Ad hoc Questions

I also turned to one of the AI tools to ask specific questions that need elaborate comparisons. Such as this use case:

One of the main struggles about the WH core data has always been keeping the Tentative Lists fully in sync with UNESCO. Their page lacks an easy overview of Tentative Sites, a downloadable full list, or a What’s new-section. There’s a specific sorting you can use to keep track of new additions, but even then, they are sometimes adding tentative sites in the past, and finding removals, of course, is a pain. You may have seen us updating this Forum topic regularly: this all comes from revisiting that UNESCO website page every day and looking for visual changes.

So, with UNESCO claiming there are now, since the WHC, 1750 tentative sites, I wanted to know which sites had changed since late June and compare the full list with the ones in our database, to see if we’re complete. Chat gave up on the task quickly, saying that the UNESCO website was unworkable because of a lack of accessible dates. When I asked it to compare our data with the PDF provided at the WHC session, it gave a “fishy” answer that it did not see any differences.

Pushing the question further, it finally came up with the suggestion to look at other sources, such as “a reputable heritage-tracking website provides a helpful update” (see quote).

It was pointing me to … the blog about the Tentative Sites of 2025, which I wrote a few weeks ago on this website!

And on a final note: a big thanks, as always, to grammarly, the AI English language writing assistant that helps me (as a non-native English speaker) to prevent spelling mistakes. All errors that are still in the text are just my own!

If you are an experienced AI User, how do you look at my findings? How could I have done better?