Despite AI's ability to organize and suggest travel plans, it fails to convey the unique human emotions and experiences associated with travel. Photo / 123rf
Despite AI's ability to organize and suggest travel plans, it fails to convey the unique human emotions and experiences associated with travel. Photo / 123rf
Ewan McDonald answers Herald readers’ travel questions and dilemmas in The First-timer’s Guide.
Q. We’re casting around for ideas on new or different destinations to visit next year, and everyone seems to recommend using AI. What’s your experience?
A. Well, the fact that you’re asking a human travel writer… but let me be scrupulously fair.
For the uninitiated, we’re essentially talking about ChatGPT here. It’s a chatbot that’s “capable of generating human-like text based on context and past conversations”. You ask it a question – the more exact wording, simpler request the better – and it returns an answer based on billions of internet inputs.
It’s true that one quick conversation with your tabletop computer can make it easier to discover new destinations or experiences and streamline suggestions for flights, hotels and so on.
The best uses of AI for travel currently fall into planning and purchasing (some… er, reservations here), such as coordinating flight plans by searching multiple platforms and responding based on your thoughts about time, price and interests.
“All the excitement around booking a trip can quickly become overwhelming when travellers are faced with lots of options that each require research,” Rathi Murthy, chief technical officer of Expedia Group, told US National Geographic. “This is what AI can solve in travel.”
Since AI doesn't have the capability to browse the internet or offer real-time information, it's best employed for preliminary planning rather than as the sole source of information. Photo / Unsplash
However, as that US company operates travel fare aggregators and metasearch engines including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Expedia Cruises, Wotif and Trivago, you may think, “Well, he would say that.”
You’ll still need to go to booking sites or a travel agent to book and verify the pricing because the current version of ChatGPT can’t search the web or give you live information – a major reason experts recommend using AI for a rough outline or starting point, and not rely on it alone.
Once you’ve decided where you want to go, you can ask for more tailored suggestions – say, galleries, shows, sports fixtures. AI is also good at responding to prompts like “less crowded” or “underrated” because – unlike user review sites like TripAdvisor, or Google – the system pools knowledge from across the internet and interprets its results to fit your query.
Note, “to fit your query”. It’s like that person who tells you what they think you want to hear. You need to be specific about what you want. The more information you give, the better your response will be. As they said in the early days of tech, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Now we come to a major downside of the current version of AI, specifically ChatGPT. Like many social media platforms, it has what can be described as a casual relationship with the truth.
First, the platform’s knowledge cuts off at September 2021 – a date when, in case you’ve forgotten, there had been four-fifths of not very much global travel and a fair old disruption to flights, hotels, restaurants and tourist activity for two and half years.
That means that it won’t be able to tell you if a hotel, restaurant, bar or museum has closed, gone out of business, or changed its name, and you may recall that happened with many travel and hospitality-related businesses in those locked-down times.
Ross Borden of Matador Network, which operates the GuideGeek AI travel platform, has identified another shortcoming. It can “hallucinate” or make up false facts when asked about small cities or towns in remote locations.
One drawback to AI like ChatGPT is its accuracy issue, with information only current up until September 2021, potentially leading to outdated or incorrect details. Photo / 123rf
“If you say, ‘What’s a great coffee shop in Shoshone, Idaho?’ you probably want to check the output because it tends to have more hallucinations in small towns when the AI doesn’t have an answer,” he says. “It will just make one up, which is obviously not good for anyone.”
I leave it to you to imagine turning up in Shoshone, Idaho, at 9pm on a Friday night to find that there is no Shoshone Hilton and all the motels are full because there’s a big college football game that weekend.
The New York Times this week published examples from another scam – AI-based guidebooks (yes, many people still use them). A guide to Moscow published in July makes no mention of Russia’s war with Ukraine and a guide to Lviv, Ukraine, published in May, encourages readers to “pack your bags and get ready for an unforgettable adventure in one of Eastern Europe’s most captivating destinations”.
You asked for my experience. Travel is a well of human experiences and emotions. Artificial Intelligence can identify what’s popular and organise an itinerary but it can’t articulate the thrills, joys, memories and muck-ups that we take home.
As the indefatigable US travel writer Rick Steves puts it, “I just cannot imagine not doing it by wearing out shoes. You’ve got to be talking to people and walking.”
If you have a travel question for our experts, email travel@nzherald.co.nz with ‘First-timer’ in the subject line
