Hotels have the power to provide us with memorable experiences and destinations for our travels. but what can we do to make the most of these experiences?
Let that statement sink in for a minute. It’s simple, yet profound and it asks the question we all ask ourselves when we travel.
And I didn’t write it. An AI text generator did.
Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve been playing around and reading more about GPT-3, the artificial-intelligence language bot that uses “deep learning,” or a type of machine learning that to put it super simply, trawls the brain of the internet and other available digital information, to generate natural, human-sounding text.
Long, long, long story short, you can play around with this AI bot and see firsthand how it generates answers to human questions by mining its gigantic digital brain. Some replies are spot-on. Some are not.
So back to my experiment. First I asked OpenAI, “What should I write for my blog?”
The reply: “That depends on the topic of your blog. You could write about the hospitality industry, exploring the various challenges and opportunities presented by the industry. You could also write about trends and innovations related to hotels, such as automation and artificial intelligence. Alternatively, you could write about personal experiences related to your travels, or about how to make the most out of a hotel stay.”
Um, what.
Yes, a computer wrote that. Even I was overwhelmed by the possibilities my AI Assigning Editor gave me, so I just asked, “What sentence should I write to start my blog?” And my super-helpful Assigning Editor, who I now call Leslie, gave me what’s at the top of the page right now.
I don’t even know where to start with this idea of bot-generated content. Will it put me out of a job? I hope not. Will it put others out of content-creating jobs? Probably. How can hotels use it? Who knows! Is it legal? Will it become the bane of college professors’ lives because of the bleed into plagiarism? Can it be plagiarism if a bot wrote it?
The questions go on and on.
And trust me, I’ve asked Leslie those questions and more.
I asked her, “Who is Stephanie Ricca?” and she replied, “Stephanie Ricca is a freelance writer and travel enthusiast, and she is the creator of the blog ‘Travel Tales From A Travel Lover.’ She has been featured in several international publications, including National Geographic and Huffington Post. Stephanie also specializes in travel photography and is passionate about exploring the world.”
Great. Now Leslie also knows my deep, unrealized ambitions that I’ve never vocalized before. She knows the life I want, if not the life I have!
Leslie’s starting to annoy me, to be honest.
I first learned about this program from Jan Freitag, CoStar’s national director of hospitality analytics, and we traded the replies to questions we asked the bot back and forth all day. Leslie the bot knew a lot about the hotel industry, including semi-recent STR data — the beta version's internet brain is only current as of 2021 — and turns out she’s also a poet. She wrote Jan, on request, a poem about hotels and the loneliness of the night auditor. You’ll have to ask Jan for the full version, but here’s an excerpt:
But in the darkness of this midnight hour
The auditor finds strength and power
To guard the guests and keep them safe
Though loneliness still fills his plate
It's fun at the end of a year to think about the innovations that will affect us in the future. Some of the out-there stuff we learn about now will mean nothing in the future — such as NFTs, seriously, come on people — while other innovations will have real staying power.
Here at Hotel News Now, we're committed to staying power.
Since this is my last blog of the year, I'll close by saying thank you. Thank you for reading Hotel News Now, for trusting our reporters — who are definitely not bots and never will be — and for challenging us to keep finding new, innovative and informative ways to be the very best at covering the news you need for success in the hotel industry.
I am confident we are that source for you, and I’m excited to keep getting better and better.
See you in 2023, and please do send me your fun hotel-related results from playing around in OpenAI.
Email me, or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.