In its most salient guise, artificial intelligence would allow hoteliers to amass data, trends and information to help them make better decisions from results that might not occur to them and their teams alone.
AI might also reach those goals in much quicker time.
The bottom line is to have artificial intelligence mixed with human intelligence. Added to that intelligence should be empathy, legality and decency.
There is huge scope for this technology, but then the problem always seems to be that humans become too involved.
This week AI is being touted for all the wrong reasons.
This is inevitable. It is probably more fun to read about how last week someone created an AI song purportedly being sung by North American pop stars Drake and the Weeknd than it is to read about how AI might help hotel construction crews, and the planet, plan better rain runoff via cleverly made and fitted guttering, as an example.
Having heard the song, maybe it is not?
That song has gone viral, which is probably inevitable when something like this occurs.
Another AI technology called ChatGPT also recently created a song that its “creators” said was an AI experiment to “write a song in the style of Nick Cave,” the Australian singer-songwriter.
Cave started writing a blog, The Red Hand Files, based on fan questions during the pandemic, so we can easily see what he thinks about such an endeavor.
He is not impressed.
“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,” Cave wrote.
Hoteliers should keep those sentiments in mind when they produce content on websites and in print.
The buildings that hotels occupy do not feel, but hoteliers do, and hotels have always been able to create and foster genuine atmospheres.
There might be for some too much excitement and too many buttons to press to create something that cannot be realized.
Is the hotel industry behind other industries in its adoption and use?
Of course, it is, and considerably so, I would guess, but there is nothing admirable in catching up when the results are clearly and falsely manipulative.
At least that’s what I think.
Cave added, “I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI — that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster.”
Can I think of anything similar that has been rolled back?
I thought driver-less cars might be scrapped, but it does not seem so, and this tech might be a safer technology than what we have now with human folly behind the wheel?
The United Kingdom government last week did scrap “smart motorways,” freeways that have no hard shoulder and saw the deaths of numerous people who had to pull over to solve mechanical problems, according to the BBC.
So, it does happen, just not often.
What is more worrying is news coming out of Germany where a weekly, celebrity-focused magazine called Die Aktuelle published what ESPN reported as being the first interview with seven-time Formula1 driver Michael Schumacher since he was seriously injured in a 2013 skiing accident.
Schumacher has not appeared in public now for a decade.
ESPN said the magazine’s publishers claimed the interview was “No meager, nebulous half-sentences from friends. But answers from him! By Michael Schumacher, 54!”
Except it wasn’t. Every one of Schumacher’s responses was AI-created.
What does that even mean?
Does it mean those “answers” are derived from what he might say now based on what he has said in the past, that is, before 2013?
As if one cannot change, say from a life-threatening incident on an Alpine slope.
This is reprehensible.
I do not know this magazine, but let’s say it is at the more puerile end of the journalistic profession. Even then, surely this is a case where empathy, legality and decency should have stepped in.
The “song” by the two American musicians might well have been created by a young person, although it could be argued that it might create difficulties in the careers of the two men, but the German article is pure malice, I would argue.
There must have been a decision-processing chain of thought there, yet no one seemed to realize pulling the plug was the right decision.
As with all things added to the pile to create noise, competitive advantage, coolness, call it want you want, common sense and sober thinking always need to be at the discussion table.
The Schumacher family are suing, apparently.
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