Another short week due to the Bank Holiday, but we hope you had a fabulous Easter weekend with your loved ones – and consumed plenty of chocolate!

Lake on a sunny day

Webinar about using AI in content design

James caught up on a webinar about how we can use AI to help in content design.

The presentation was by Joe Lewis and Michael Hutchings from Welsh Government who introduced Dylun, their AI-powered content design assistant.

A key take-away was that today’s AI can’t replace human content designers. But it can offer a better first draft to work on.

With the right prompts and commands, AI can:

  • simplify the content
  • structure it in a logical way
  • arrange it into sections and bullet points
  • follow a Flesch-Kincaid reading age level

However, the AI drafts:

  • didn’t consistently follow the Welsh Government style guide
  • used Americanisms (as the large language models are mainly trained on US English)
  • over-used bullet points, which made the content disjointed
  • could be repetitive
  • didn’t sound like natural human language

Joe and Michael were keen to emphasise that Dylun won’t directly publish AI-written content. The human content designer still needs to work on the AI draft to get the final version. But AI can help organisational efficiency by ‘fixing’ common issues with bad content and freeing up more time for the content designer to work on thornier issues.

New accessible reports published to the website

The publishing team have hit the ground running this week, with lots of new evidence reports being published accessibly, thanks to support from our wonderful subject matter experts. It’s great to see such valuable research shared on our website in a format that is accessible to all.

Screenshot of NRW's reserch and reports webpage

Catching up as a team

Twice weekly we meet to discuss the content requests that have been sent in and to allocate amongst the team. We had a surprisingly busy week despite the Bank Holiday with lots of new requests that have been added to our work queue. We’ve also been testing forms and webpages to find and correct broken links and documents.

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • Shaun has been tidying up some odds and ends whilst trying to compile a list of user needs for species related content.
  • Sophie and Kim have been outlining training activities to onboard our new starter next week.
  • Sam and Phil were involved in another really good workshop this week with species specialists. They are continuing to refine the application form flow and wording for applications to control fish-eating birds. Next week the team will be working on content including guidance, start and confirmation pages.