What's the deal with AI & travel writing?
This month's newsletters will focus on the threats and benefits of AI in travel writing.
Are you worried that AI is about to take your job? You should be.
Late last year, I learned how close we are to this becoming a reality. I was on a press trip alongside a guy from a luxury tour operator, and he told me outright that AI had already come for our profession: his company had recently fired all of their writer in charge of brochure and website copy. Who was replacing them? I’ll give you one guess.
I’ve experimented with various generative AI tools since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022 and multiple other tech companies quickly followed suit. I’ve used them to write emails, translate interviews, suggest clickworthy titles for articles, and to bounce ideas off. With creative tasks, the results have consistently been underwhelming.
These chatbots send me back to my days as an English teacher: they’re like earnest, keen-to-impress students who’ve heard that the key to great writing is sounding like you’ve binged a thesaurus. If this example of a company replacing its writers with AI hadn’t been such a clear bellwether of the direction in which our industry is heading, then I would have found it comical that a luxury company believed the mediocre writing of a non-sentient being was even remotely good enough.
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I’ve spoken to writers and editors about AI infiltrating travel writing, and it likely comes as no surprise to hear that the picture is grim. Fionn Davenport, the managing editor of Forsman&Bodenfors Dublin, says he’s seen writers passing off AI-written service pieces as their own and, within these articles, “a lot of the information is just either misguided, misdirected or just plain wrong,” he explains. Perhaps even more worrying is the fact that I’ve heard that large media companies have started publishing content that was written by a writer in one format and then transformed by AI into another — with the writer’s byline being attached to it, even though they’d never touched nor seen this secondary work (or, equally importantly, been paid for their words to be adapted like this).
Using AI to write travel articles is, as Fionn points out, a dangerous game to play: not only are these writers effectively plagiarising others’ writing (after all, AI is only able to regurgitate the writing it has been trained on), but they’re making themselves redundant in the long-term. If we’re using AI to pen our pieces, then why won’t companies bypass us entirely and go straight to the (regurgitated) source?
Travel writer Eryn Gordon thinks that publications should be implementing AI editorial policies. “If a travel writer chooses to use AI, I think they have a responsibility to use it ethically and be transparent with their readers,” she says, explaining that she has a section on her website, Earth To Editorial, that defines how and when AI is used. As travel writers, we exist at the very bottom of the editorial food chain and so have little to no say about whether or how the publications we write for use AI. But what we can do is avoid using it in ways that will allow it to be a catalyst for our own demise.
Having nerded out on some of the AI tools over the past few weeks, I’m convinced there is a small place for AI in travel writing. Creatives from across industries have been quick to point out that when we envisioned the advent of AI, it was in the form of capable robots that would take over mundane tasks, such as cleaning or planning the shopping. I think we can use it in that way in our writing.
When Google launched its AI overviews — those AI-generated summaries that now dominate the top of Google's search results — the internet was equally outraged and entertained by its incorrect, insane, and downright dangerous suggestions (using glue to stop cheese from melting off the top of your pizza was my personal favourite). It remains a sage reminder that “hallucinations”, as they’ve become known, are still a real issue; using AI for facts should be done carefully. It's important to remember that AI answers are only as good as the prompts you give it — and there’s a steep learning curve for getting that right.
I’ve found it fantastic for sense-checking turns of phrases and, when I was at a loss for how to tie everything together at the end of the piece, brainstormed some ideas with it that I used to guide the ending. We’ll go into more specific ways you can use AI to help your creative processes later this month.
It’s clear from this ALCS survey into writers’ perspectives of AI that the industry needs reform; there’s no doubt that our published works have already been used to train generative AI, and conversations around renumeration and licensing need to be had. Ultimately, the debate around AI in travel writing is one that hinges on both the ethics of writing and what it means to be a human. It’s also one that each and every creative industry is grappling with right now. Creativity is the essence of what makes us human, and our writing is an extension of who we are and our perspective of the world and its people. Can machines ever replicate that?
We’re all aware that budgets for travel content have declined significantly over the years, and I’d be surprised if you hadn’t personally confronted the very real fear that travel writing is no longer a viable full-time career for most. Surely, therefore, our collective job is to remind our editors why we, human writers, are the people who should be penning these stories. We can physically travel, feel, taste and smell; all aspects of the human condition that our AI competitors cannot, yet, do.
Free mentoring for travel journalists in northeast England
Middlesbrough-born freelance travel writer Adam Turner is offering a series of free mentoring sessions to aspiring writers from a working-class background who hail from the northeast of England. Read about his laid-back, monthly 'What's the craic?' sessions here.
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Industry must-reads
On the theme of AI, this extensive ALCS report breaks down the data on how authors, writers and literary estates feel about AI, and who is using it in their workflow and output. Our friends at Freelancing for Journalists are also running a series on AI; this newsletter talks you through some of the ways to get the best out of it. On Adventure.com, Steph has written this fascinating piece on AI in travel planning.
This was the first newsletter in our April AI in travel writing series. Get the rest — and access to our archive — by becoming a paid subscriber. Don’t forget, Meera Dattani has a host of excellent webinars on travelwritingwebinars.com.
I've been worrying about this quite a lot this week after seeing the new Chat GPT images - very concerning for the creative industry as a whole. Looking forward to reading the rest of this series!