Travel is a uniquely human experience. It satisfies the urge to discover the unknown; to experience something. Across all industries, artificial intelligence (AI) offers exciting opportunities to boost worker productivity. However, there’s an increasing wariness in the world; a fear that humans could be replaced. While machines already do the work of some factory workers and manual laborers, they now seem to be coming for artists and creatives. After all, what’s to say this paragraph wasn’t written by ChatGPT (it wasn’t, but can I prove that?).
It’s true: experts predict that 90% of online content could be AI-generated by 2026. This includes travel content – clickbait listicles and destination round-ups are no doubt being churned out by robots at rapid speed. Large language models have become adept at mimicking human language and creating content that feels real. But this is only copying already lazy content. At Intrepid Times, we have a style that can’t be replicated. Our stories arise from the unexpected, the unscripted, and the emotionally moving. ChatGPT has never got lost in a Marrakech marketplace or been stuck on a broken-down tuk-tuk. It doesn’t know the feeling.
Real Writing is the Product of Struggle
All art comes from suffering. That’s not to say that a person must experience hardship to make great art. It’s to say that the act of creation is, in itself, difficult. Writing a story takes work and readers recognize this struggle in the resulting text. An AI chatbot doesn’t put in an ounce of effort to write articles, which is reflected in the final product.
Renowned musician Nick Cave said something similar about songwriting:
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
Art comes from humans creating something bigger than themselves. When a story moves you, it’s because you’re in awe of what a human being has created. Since AI cannot struggle and does not reach beyond its capabilities, the final result can never hit you like human-made writing.
Real Travel Writing Requires First-Hand Experience
Whether attending a bullfight in Spain or helping a stabbing victim in Colombia, travel experiences move the protagonist. They make you feel something. Any robot can describe the physical qualities of a place or relay what took place there, but can it express emotions it’s never felt? A great writer uses language to evoke the awe of the Andes or explain how heartbreak compelled them to travel. Sublime storytelling is the result of lived experience.
AI is also hopelessly unoriginal. Every word it types is taken from the almost infinite supply of content it has consumed. It gathers information and re-arranges it into an order that makes the most sense to a human reader. In doing so, it fails to create anything novel. All writers are inspired and influenced by what they’ve read, but Intrepid Times stories are necessarily original in that they draw on the unique personal experience of the writer. They’re the delicate coalescence of a single person’s experience of a particular time and place.
AI Can’t Build a Story Arc or Find its Voice
Creating a long-form narrative isn’t easy. Many humans struggle to build a coherent narrative, which weaves character development into a structured beginning, middle, and end. AI cannot hold a narrative flow for more than a few sentences. A good story is built around rising tension, resolution, and personal transformation.
At first glance, most AI writing looks pretty good. On the surface, it can appear human written. However, the more you dig into the depth of a story, the less this is the case. As editors, we can generally tell when a writer has turned to ChatGPT. The writing becomes predictable, full of clichés, and increasingly incoherent. When a story stretches over a thousand words, AI tends to lose the thread. Once it gets confused, the wording becomes increasingly muddled.
Large language models are predictors. They take an input and use their wealth of information to predict the response that makes the most sense. But travel often doesn’t make sense. The best stories arise out of the surprising and unpredictable. Stories are the result of spontaneous interactions and absurd encounters. There is no clear pattern when it comes to exploring different cultures.
Plus, AI lacks personality. When building a story arc, each writer has a distinctive voice. You might try to copy the style of Ernest Hemingway or Margaret Atwood, but over a long enough text, your personality will shine through. This voice is the result of your upbringing, worldview, and cultural bias. It seeps out in your use of irony, humor, and idioms. AI, which has had no such experiences, but rather the sum total of human knowledge in its arsenal, will tend to sound generic and flat.
Real Writing Requires Memory, Meaning, and Ethics
Travel writing is a question of nuance. Writers often re-tell stories long after the fact, relying on their fallible memories. When a bearded artist in Prague locked me in his underground gallery (true story), I was naturally scared. In my memory, the artist was probably much larger and angrier than in reality. The story that emerged was a reflection of how the events unfolded in my mind, rather than objective truth. Memory is a vital tool in the writer’s toolbox. It shapes how stories are told. But AI doesn’t have a memory to draw upon, so its writing isn’t subtly shifted by the passage of time.
The other advantage of writing from memory is that it allows for a period of reflection. In the moment, events are relentlessly and rapidly fired at the traveler. It’s only in retrospect that we can organize these experiences and draw meaning from them. AI, having not really experienced anything, can merely make up meaning. But meaning is something that only exists in the minds of human beings. It takes a great deal of introspection and philosophizing to settle on which message to take from a travel experience.
Finally, travel writing is an ethical exercise, and AI is notoriously useless at ethics. When venturing into different cultures, travelers encounter all sorts of nuances that AI cannot pick up on. There are unspoken rules, misunderstandings, and tensions. Travelers need to quickly determine how to behave at border control or how to interact with animals. They’re faced with a myriad of moral dilemmas on an almost daily basis. AI misses these nuances completely and can’t put together a consistent ethical framework for neither love nor money.
When we write, it’s important to consider how to portray other cultures. For instance, when I chanced upon a Romani-populated slum in Belgrade, I agonized over how to share my experience with both sensitivity and honesty. Travel writers are obligated to write with a degree of awareness and integrity, mindful of their impact on the communities we encounter.
Long Live Humanity
Fundamentally, AI cannot travel. It cannot have the experiences it writes about. Therefore, any travel story it comes up with is a soulless lie. At Intrepid Times, we will always stick up for human writers – for nuance, creativity, originality, curiosity, discovery, perception, emotion, and lived experience.
