EXCLUSIVE: Greek Column Will Not Be Launching an AI Travel Agent
Because artificial intelligence can be hazardous for your holidays
Growing up in a country that used to be called the United States — these days you have to be careful what to call things or you’ll end up in the hallway or worse, like the AP — it was ingrained in all of us that artificial ingredients are bad for you. That that truism applies to intelligence too: in other words, artificial intelligence is toxic. Unhealthy. Bad.
It is also an affront to individual freedom and common sense. Consider that the inanely named DOGE, or so-called “Dept. of Government Efficiency,” is reportedly using AI to assess the responses of federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email. That’s about as yucky as Tesla cars are ugly.
These revelations are hardly a surprise, because companies have already been engaged in this nefarious practice of abdicating actual human thought and common sense for a while now. On Monday our esteemed (?) House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, said at an event in Washington, “Elon has cracked the code. He is now inside the agencies. He’s created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data. And as he told me in his office, the data doesn’t lie.”
Well, Elon Musk is wrong: data does lie and the reason is that data is always incomplete. Taken in isolation, it is ridiculously easy to misinterpret and just as easy to weaponize data. That is happening right now in our nation’s capital.
It is in a word, craven and disgusting. So that’s two words. Here’s more:
Growing up in America in the 1980s at the dawn of the age of personal computing, school kids used to tease the computer geeks for a reason — these were the kids who dressed like nerds, who couldn’t or wouldn’t play a sport, who couldn’t get laid. Not the kinds of guys and gals you’d ever want to see in power — or in a power grab.
Media and industry has been complicit in this ongoing calamity. Just like the media made a movie star out of a putz like Elon Musk, they thrust geeks like Open AI’s Sam Altman on a pedestal, torpedoing their own livelihoods in the process. Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc. are all in on the big swindle, which is essentially pissing on the American middle class while calling it rain. That is quite easy to do when your reality is a gate-guarded community in Atherton or super yacht polluting the Aegean Sea.
Which brings us back to the realm of travel. We are aware that a number of airlines and travel companies are in the process of launching “AI-powered” travel booking agents and that this reflects a growing trend in the industry.
To that we say this: Phooey.
One example: Qatar Airways, which recently had the genius to pay the no-talent Kevin Hart probably mucho to narrate one of the longest and most obnoxious in-flight safety videos known to man, now according to Skift has a “new tool” that is “an extension of Qatar’s AI cabin crew, known as ‘Sama,’ which was branded as a ‘digital human’ on Qatar’s virtual reality platform.”
A “digital human” to show us the way, huh? Thank you, next.
Planning your trip to Greece? We have already thought of that: not so you don’t have to, but so that you can do it neatly and naturally, with the benefit of our blood, sweat, and tears, and jetlag and hotel stays and ferry trips and gas bills and museum hours and interviews with tourism officials and hotel owners and restaurant managers and industry leaders, to help you maximize your time in the country that elevated human consciousness to an art form.
There is nothing artificial about that — I repeat, nothing artificial, and on this Column, there never will be. Here, we go hard on the authentic: so should you.
— Anthony Grant, Editor
