An imagined town in Peru, an Eiffel tower in Beijing: travellers are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT for itinerary ideas – and being sent to destinations that don’t exist.
An imagined town in Peru, an Eiffel tower in Beijing: travellers are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT for itinerary ideas – and being sent to destinations that don’t exist.
When I was on my cross-Canada trip with SO in 2024, there was a time when we were on a gondola lift with a bunch of the younger generation. They were planning a trip to Ottawa (Ottawa being sort of my stomping grounds of over 20 years). They were asking ChatGPT for things to visit and then commenting on them out loud. Which allowed us to hear that well over half the “interesting sights” they were planning on seeing in Ottawa didn’t exist. Some of them were locations in Montreal (Concordia University campus) or elsewhere in Ontario (UWO campus). But the rest just didn’t exist anywhere at all as far as I knew.
Even worse, the ones ChatGPT uttered that did exist they put in the wrong sections of the city. Kind of like going to Queens to see Broadway in New York.
I wonder how many times an AI needs to fuck up before people just lose confidence in it?
Given that it’s basically just a fuck-up generator and always has been, I don’t think there’s any hope for that course.
The fact it can’t be made into money is what kills this round of AI, triggering the fifth? sixth? winter.