AI Revolutionizes Vacation and Honeymoon Planning in 2024

Can AI help me plan my honeymoon?

I'm getting married later this summer and am feverishly planning a honeymoon together with my fiancé. It has been at times overwhelming trying to research and decide between what seem like millions of options while juggling busy work schedules and wedding planning. Thankfully, my colleague Rhiannon Williams has just published a piece about how to use AI to plan your vacation. You can read her story here. The timing could not be better! I decided to put her tips to the test and use AI to plan my honeymoon itinerary. I asked ChatGPT to suggest a travel plan over three weeks in Japan and the Philippines, our dream destinations. I told the chatbot that in Tokyo I wanted to see art and design and eat good food, and in the Philippines I wanted to go somewhere laid-back and outdoorsy that is not very touristy. I also asked ChatGPT to be specific in its suggestions for hotels and activities to book. The results were pretty good, and they aligned with the research I had already done. I was delighted to see the AI propose we visit Siargao Island in the Philippines, which is known for its surfing. We were planning on going there anyway, but I haven't had a chance to do much research on what there is to do. ChatGPT came up with some divine-looking day trips involving a stingless-jellyfish sanctuary, cave pools, and other adventures. The AI produced a decent first draft of the trip itinerary. I reckon this saved me a lot of time doing research on planned destinations I didn't know much about, such as Siargao. But ... when I asked about places I did know more about, such as Tokyo, I wasn't that impressed. ChatGPT suggested I visit Shibuya Crossing and eat at a sushi restaurant, which, like, c'mon, are some of the most obvious things for tourists to do there. However, I am willing to consider that the problem might have been me and my prompting. Because I found that the more specific I made my prompts, the better the results were. But here's the thing. Language models work by predicting the next likely word in a sentence. These AI systems don't have an understanding of what it is like to experience these things, or how long they take. For example, ChatGPT suggested spending one whole day taking photos at a scenic spot. That would get boring pretty quickly. The AI systems of today lack the kind of last-mile reasoning and planning skills that would help me with logistics and budgeting. It also suggested accommodations that were way out of our price range. But this whole process might become much smoother as we build the next generation of AI agents. Agents are AI algorithms and models that can complete complex tasks in the real world. The idea is that one day they could execute a vast range of tasks, much like a human assistant. Agents are the new hot thing in AI, and I just published an explainer looking at what they are and how they work. You can read it here.

How to use AI to plan your next vacation

Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But drawing up a list of activities for a trip can also be time-consuming and stressful, particularly if you don't know where to begin. Luckily tech companies have been competing to create tools that can help you to do just that. Travel has become one of the most popular use cases for AI that Google, Microsoft and OpenAI like to point to in demos, and firms like Tripadvisor, Expedia, and Booking.com have started to launch AI-powered vacation planning products too. While AI agents that can manage the entire process of planning and booking your vacation for you are still some way off, the current generation of AI tools are still pretty handy at helping you with various tasks, like creating itineraries for trips or brushing up on your language skills. AI models are prone to making stuff up, which means you should always double-check their suggestions yourself. But they can still be a really useful resource. Read on for some ideas for how AI tools can help to make your time away that little bit easier -- leaving you with more time to enjoy yourself. First thing's first: you have to choose where to travel to. The beauty of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT is that they're trained on vast swathes of the internet, meaning they can quickly condense information that would take a human hours to research into simple paragraphs. This makes them great tools to help draw you up a list of places you'd be interested in going -- the more specific you can be in your prompt, the better -- for example, telling the chatbot you'd like suggestions for destinations with warm climates, child-friendly beaches and busy nightlife (such as Mexico, Thailand, Ibiza, and Australia) will return more relevant countries than vague prompts. However, given AI models' propensity for making up statements -- known as hallucinating -- it's worth checking that the locations and potential activities it's provided you with are actually accurate. How to use it: Fire up your LLM of choice -- ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot are just some of the available models -- and ask it to suggest locations for a holiday. Include important details like the kind of temperatures, locations, length of trip, and activities you're interested in. This could look something like: "Suggest a list of locations for two people going on a two-week vacation. The locations should be hot throughout July and August, based in a city but with easy access to a beach." Once you're on your vacation, you can use tools like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini to draw up itineraries for day trips. For example, you could use a prompt like: 'give me an itinerary for a day driving from Florence around the countryside in Chianti. Include some medieval villages, a winery, and finish with dinner at a restaurant with a good view'. As always with LLMs, the more specific you can be, the better. And to be on the safe side, you ought to cross-reference the final itinerary against Google Maps to check if the order of the suggestions makes sense.

The Download: vacation planning with AI, and smaller models

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But it can also be time-consuming and stressful, particularly if you don't know where to begin. Luckily tech companies have been competing to create tools that can help you with everything from creating itineraries to booking flights to brushing up on your language skills. While AI agents that can manage the entire process of planning and booking your vacation for you are still some way off, the current generation of AI tools are still pretty handy. Here's how they can help to make your time away that little bit easier -- leaving you with more time to enjoy yourself. Read the full story. I've combed the internet to find you today's most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 AI models are getting smaller and smaller Giant models are being overlooked in favor of faster, less powerful software. (WSJ $) + These words are a dead giveaway that text is LLM-generated. (Wired $)

The Download: planning a honeymoon with AI, and deepfakes in 2024

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. I'm getting married later this summer and am feverishly planning a honeymoon together with my fiancé. It has been at times overwhelming trying to research and decide between what seem like millions of options while juggling busy work schedules and wedding planning. So I decided to take inspiration from a piece we just published about how to use AI to plan your vacation and tried using the same tools to design my honeymoon itinerary. The results were pretty good, and they aligned with the research I had already done into where to go and what to do in the Philippines. But when I asked about places I did know more about, such as Tokyo, I wasn't that impressed. Read the full story. This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter diving into the complicated world of AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday. Deepfakes are proliferating online thanks to advances in generative AI. There's a lot of potential for misuse -- think political disinformation and nonconsensual sexual content. But there are a growing number of reasons why you may want a deepfake made of yourself or a loved one, too. Join MIT Technology Review reporters and editors for a fascinating discussion on the rise of deepfakes. We're running a LinkedIn Live at 12pm ET this afternoon -- register here to join in the conversion.