Artificial Expectations
How AI is changing our image of the unknown
The whitewashed house seems to have been built right where the ocean meets the cliffs, as though it’s emerging from the Aegean Sea. Next to it is a large swimming pool, its water so turquoise that it’s almost luminous.
During a couple of weeks, I see images of the house being shared on several different Instagram accounts, and in the comments, people are repeatedly asking for its location. The house is everything they wish for in a holiday home, and in their mind they’re probably already there, lounging by the pool or going for a morning swim in the sea. They can already feel the sun on their skin, the taste of the evening’s first Mythos on their lips.
Only problem is, the house doesn’t exist, it’s digital make-believe, generated by AI.
AI services are already in use in the travel industry. AI assistants and “intelligent” chatbots have (for better or worse) taken the place of travel agents, allowing travellers to book flights and accommodations and hire vehicles online. However, anyone who has used this service but needed answers outside of the typical conversation between a traveller and an agent will know its limitations: AI lacks imagination.
Robots are expected to replace humans in the check-in process by 2030, and there’s already a few hotels (like the Henn-na Hotel in Nagasaki and Finn Apartments in Lund) that’s fully staffed by robots used for check-in and checkout processing.
AI is used to sort through vast data sets to better predict how people will want to travel in the future, linked to how social media is used to listen to you and understand the driving forces for your behaviour.
When the travel industry discusses AI trends for 2025 (and beyond), the focus tends to be on practical solutions like the above, or smart baggage handling at airports (like how the Eindhoven Airport has successfully used AI powered luggage handling without baggage labels), the development of self-service (machines replacing staff), and how travel planning can be more personalized by tapping into your google searches and online behaviour.
Some of these things are positive; who wouldn’t want to quickly be able to track down a lost piece of checked luggage? Others exist in a grey area; sometimes speaking with a human can indeed feel like having a conversation with a machine, but nevertheless, if I need help with something complicated and I’m abroad in a foreign country, I much prefer to be helped by an actual person with a mind of their own.
But in my mind, I keep returning to the image of the Greek house by the sea. To me, this is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the AI-driven transformation in travel. Many people are now dreaming of visiting places that don’t exist, their view of what the world looks like is becoming skewed thanks to machine-made fantasy images that vaguely resemble actual places. People know what the Greek archipelago looks like, and so they’re not surprised when the see the images, and if you don’t look too closely, you can be convinced that this charming house is real, and then you base your expectations on these kinds of digitally created photos.
AI – artificial intelligence – is creating an artificial image of reality. What will happen to the people commenting on these images when they arrive in actual Greece? Is this a contemporary version of the Paris phenomenon, which occurred in the space between expectation and reality, when Japanese tourists arriving in France realized that they had been viewing Paris through an idealised filter? Disappointed, they looked around and couldn’t believe that this place, where people went to work and lived their (boring) everyday lives, actually was the same Paris that they had seen in pastel-coloured photos and read about in romantic novels.
The real danger, as I see it, is that AI won’t be used only as a service or aid to human intelligence, but as a replacement. In this case, it’s replacing human imagination, streamlining the fantasy of the unknown based on what computers think our dreams of the perfect getaway look like.
And judging by the comments, the machines are succeeding – for every person exclaiming “it’s fake, it’s AI” there are twenty others asking for the address to the location.