TECH TO KNOW
CAN AI BOOK YOUR CLIENT ’ S DREAM VACATION ?
AI has massive potential to reinvent the way we plan and book travel — but it ’ s not there yet .
WORDS / ANNA HELD
SOMYUZU / SHUTTERSTOCK . COM
From powering robots to chatbots , AI has the potential to change how we work , live and communicate . OpenAI , the organization behind ChatGPT , believes that most jobs will be at least somewhat impacted by large languagemodel-powered software . But exactly what that looks like — and when it will happen — is still uncertain . We dug into how ChatGPT and AI could impact travel advisors and answered the existential question : “ Is it coming for travel advisors ’ jobs ?”
WHAT CHATGPT IS GOOD AT AND WHERE IT FALLS SHORT ChatGPT is an AI chatbot built on OpenAI ’ s large language-learning models . You can ask open-ended questions , and it will answer them conversationally . Unlike old-school chatbots , which are pre-trained based on likely questions and answers , you can ask ChatGPT literally anything , for better or worse .
Right now , while the technology seems revolutionary , it ’ s still in fairly early stages . ChatGPT was launched as a prototype at the end of 2022 and still has a long way to go before it replaces jobs .
One major concern with ChatGPT ( and all AI ) is that it will answer with information that sounds correct but is factually wrong . This phenomenon is called a hallucination . For example , you could ask it to explain an academic concept to you with citations . The resulting explanation of the concept may be correct , but the citations could be totally made up . OpenAI said their new release will have fewer hallucinations , but that ’ s yet to be seen .
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