Would you trust an AI travel influencer? I ask an AI expert.
There’s an increasing amount of travel content generated by AI, and it’s getting harder to distinguish it from content written by real people.
A recent reel by a travel influencer reads ‘These places in Germany feel unreal’ as the figure of a woman walks in a mountain. But this travel influencer is actually AI. She doesn’t exist, she can’t feel, and the pictures of Germany are unreal.
As a travel writer who has lived in Germany and knows the country well, I didn’t warm to the concept of the ‘AI travel companion for the German National Tourist Board’. I wanted to understand more about AI travel content and consider some of the pros and cons.
So, I met up for a coffee with Morgan, an AI expert and close relative, to chat about all things travel and AI. I’ll share the insights from our conversation in this article to help you ask yourself, would you trust an AI travel influencer?
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What’s an AI Travel Influencer? ‘Emma’ is a Chatbot with a Pretty Face
The German National Tourism Board’s AI account, @emmatravelsgermany
I first heard about ‘Emma’, the AI travel influencer, on Episode 3 of the Travel Lemming Podcast. I went straight to Instagram to check out the page and was met with a reel of a ‘woman’ who meets ideal Western beauty standards.
In the first reel, ‘Emma’ stands in front of artificial German scenes and, curiously, talks in a posh British accent. She has since adopted a Germanic accent, hinting at a fairly major identity crisis.
Understandably, many human content creators were outraged that their work had been deprioritised in favour of an avatar. A glance through the 1,000+ comments on the first post, many of which are very witty, gives this sense of disapproval.
The German National Tourist Board has stated that it intends to use ‘Emma’ to complement human content, an ‘in addition to’ rather than an ‘instead of’. The idea is that the AI stuff will generate more interest in other, human-made travel content. Time will tell whether this materialises.
I sat down in a cafe with Morgan Walters, a data scientist who designs and builds AI solutions, and introduced him to ‘Emma.’ A much quicker introduction than between actual humans. Morgan’s first response was “That’s just weird”.
As a keen traveller, I could tell Morgan found the glossy, sanitised images of ‘Emma’ and Germany quite bizarre. And as a professional in the world of AI, Morgan respects the skill behind the creation of ‘Emma’ and refers to it as “an interesting project”.
I quiz him on what ‘Emma’ actually is and how it works. He says “It’s basically a generic chatbot with a pretty face.” And he’s not being diminishing, ‘Emma’ is literally described on the website as an AI-generated chatbot. Morgan explains that the AI-generated avatar on Instagram is just a glossy cover for a generic AI model.
What to Consider Before Trusting AI Travel Influencers
AI travel influencers regurgitate existing information and data
The generic AI model behind ‘Emma’ and other chatbots has ingested and amalgamated big swathes of data and information.
This data crunching would take humans a very long time to do and has many good uses. For example, Morgan’s area of work in process safety helps high-risk industries find insights into data to improve the safety of operations.
Morgan explains that people can control the data input to an AI model and can analyse what it generates. But there is a lack of transparency in how data is processed and regurgitated by AI. What happens in the middle is a ‘black box’, a mysterious artificial space.
So, AI-generated travel content can be difficult to trace and needs fact-checking. You may never know why or how your AI travel companion is churning out the information it gives you – not what you’d want to be relying on whilst exploring a new country.
Morgan says that it depends on how the AI model is set up but that often, “AI travel content wouldn’t know all the up-to-date stuff.” He gives the example of bus travel in our home country Wales, where bus timetables change regularly and cunning transport connections can’t even be found online.
I ask him if he would trust an AI travel influencer to plan an itinerary for a trip. He says he wouldn’t. In Morgan’s eyes, AI lacks genuine creativity and he questions what decisions AI should make for us.
Could AI plan an itinerary? Sure, but Morgan says it likely wouldn’t be the kind of itinerary he’s looking for as someone who likes to roam off the beaten track and get a real feel for a place.
AI travel content can’t share original destinations
As we sip on our coffees, Morgan says something that piques my interest, “AI can only promote places that are already promoted online.”
Most of the existing data feeding AI comes from content made by people. Many people are understandably concerned about if and how their content is being used by AI. Without even realising it, content we produce is probably being used to help train AI models.
We talk about my Cardiff restaurant article and reminisce about stuffing our faces with a delicious mezze at Shaam Nights, the Syrian restaurant we visited together at the time of writing the article. We reflect on how we tasted, experienced, and enjoyed the restaurant, something that AI travel influencers cannot do.
The restaurant is outside of the typical tourist trail of the city and not featured in tons of articles. If a restaurant doesn’t have much, or any, online content, that restaurant is unlikely to feature in AI-generated content. The same is true for lesser-known destinations.
We decide to ask ‘Emma’ a question. I type in the chat box ‘Which are the best cities in Germany?’ Before ‘Emma’ responds, I predict that the answers will include Berlin, Munich, Hamburg or Cologne. Well-known, already-popular destinations.
As predicted, ‘Emma’ suggests Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne. My recommendation of Dortmund, a German city you’ve probably never considered visiting, is unlikely to appear. And some of the best destinations to travel in 2025 wouldn’t appear because, well, they are rather original and unique recommendations.
AI travel content aims to people please and has a tendency to exaggerate stereotypes
The fact that ‘Emma’ suggested the already-established, popular destinations in Germany is no coincidence.
I ask Morgan why this is, and why almost all of the AI ‘people’ I’ve seen, including ‘Emma,’ are white women with blonde hair. Morgan explains that most generic AI models are, by nature of the way that they are trained, people-pleasers.
AI models trained on the wide web can also pick up biases and stereotypes and amplify these in generated content. And when efforts have been made to rectify this, AI models have sometimes totally missed the mark and the nuance of context.
AI models are also susceptible to reinforce bias due to the underlying biases present in information used to train the model.
He throws in the term ‘Reinforcement learning with human feedback’ to describe how AI models will learn from, and repeat, what people involved in the training phase respond positively to. So, if the AI model learns that humans respond well to ingrained societal bias or stereotypes, it could feed off that.
But Morgan points out that people do check the output of AI in most circumstances, something known as ‘human in the loop’. So people are involved in finalising decisions and verifying the AI output, such as how ‘Emma’ the avatar looks.
We put this to the test by generating some AI images on Adobe Firefly. As a redhead and travel writer based in Wales, I started with the basics. I entered the prompts ‘generate an image of Wales’ and ‘generate an image of a redhead in Wales’.
Firstly, we were greeted with a fantasy-board-game-like monstrosity which clumsily combines some of the most basic stereotypes of Wales: mountains, castles, and dragons.
And well, the images from the second prompt really made us chuckle.
We were amused to see a woman in the mountains dressed in medieval attire with an animal ear emerging from her auburn locks. Contrary to our common depictions in TV and films, redheads do not exclusively wear attire fit for a period drama. Another stereotype that AI seems to be thriving off.
There’s a risk that stereotypes and bias in existing travel content will be amplified through AI content.
Granted, human travel creators sometimes exaggerate stereotypes and biases, but AI travel content is truly an echo chamber. Morgan and I agreed that we wouldn’t trust AI travel influencers to provide accurate, authentic, and original travel suggestions.
And in terms of avatars, it feels like AI is undoing progress made to platform and celebrate diversity within the world of travel content creators.
AI-generated images of destinations are both flawless and flawed
Morgan and I look at the clean, shiny, and idealised German scenes behind ‘Emma.’ I originally (perhaps ignorantly) thought that the backdrops might be real. Morgan explains that most AI-generated content like this is ‘all or nothing’. So if the ‘person’ is fake, so is the backdrop.
AI models will have been trained upon real photos of real places, in order to generate images of those places. This seems rather convoluted to me, so I ask Morgan what he thinks of AI-generated images of travel destinations. He questions why you would even want that, and says “It’s a bit of a dystopian tech future when you think about it.”
When you’re considering visiting a destination, don’t you want to see photos of it? Like, actual photos of it? Morgan and I reflect on the fact that photo-editing software changed the authenticity of images in travel content, but this is another level.
AI-generated travel content simply doesn’t, and cannot, show authentic images of destinations.
When we created an AI-generated image of ‘a woman in Berlin’, it appears to show the Berlin Cathedral in a composition that doesn’t exist. And, well, AI seems to have conflated Cardiff with a quaint town in Central Europe because the image does not remotely resemble my home city.
AI-generated images of travel destinations often distort reality and could be misleading and incorrect.
Travel influencers often disproportionately portray travel as positive, happy, and problem-free. If you’ve travelled before, you know it’s not like that all the time! But with its people-pleasing tendencies, AI is even more geared toward generating idealised images where everything is shiny, clean, and flawless.
AI travel content lacks emotion and soul
We ask ‘Emma’ for some hidden gems in Germany and receive just two rather bland suggestions. A chatbot tends to give you what you ask for, nothing more, nothing less. AI can give straight facts and present information in ways that are easy to digest. But the answers and information are very transactional and surface-level.
Morgan says that he would trust an AI travel influencer to answer basic, factual information about a destination. He caveats that you still need to take answers with a pinch of salt, but also points out that humans can get facts wrong. In general, AI is good at providing simple answers, which could well come in handy on a trip abroad.
But then our conversation turns to what we actually value in travel and in travel content.
Unlike the charming, long-winded replies you may get when you ask for recommendations from a stranger on a bus in Bogotá or a fellow hostel guest in Sarajevo, AI stays in its box.
I had a lightbulb moment and realised what it was about AI travel content that makes me feel uncomfortable and uninspired. I look at Morgan and say “That’s it! There’s nothing to make you go ooh!”
AI travel content doesn’t broaden your horizons, expand your mind, or stimulate in the way content made by people can.
I agree with Morgan when he says he doesn’t seek out travel content just for a “factual romp” through a destination. AI is getting us hooked on having access to huge swathes of data and answers to everything, all the time.
But AI travel content is factual, emotionless, and sanitised. People are not and travel is not. ‘Emma’ uses phrases like “I love discovering special places”, and “I think”, but the avatar is void of passion, experience, life… and soul. The very things that make travel special are missing from AI-generated travel content.
People working in AI recognise that generated content is formulaic and are trying to break the data down. So that it’s even more like a person, but right now, AI falls short in this area.
The Future of AI-Generated Travel Content is Uncertain
AI is really blurring the lines between reality and fiction. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell if content is AI-generated or not, especially as the technology progresses.
It’d be easy to scroll quickly past the posts of ‘Emma’ and not even realise it is AI-generated. This concerns me for many reasons, not least because the way that some people interact with AI-generated content can be pretty problematic. The issue of online misogyny affects real women and is complicated enough, without throwing in avatars.
The very nature of how AI works means you’re a few steps removed from authentic, real experiences. As Morgan puts it, “If you’re living through the lens of AI or your phone, you’re separating yourself from the true experience.”
I’m not saying that travellers will replace human interaction with AI. But it’s not implausible. Plenty of people already ask their phones for information that a local could provide, distancing themselves from what’s going on around them.
Morgan points out that “it’s getting harder to find content written by humans.”
He mentions the dead internet theory which suggests that the internet mainly consists of sloppy bot-made content.
Maybe the question is less about trust and more about principles, values and inspiration. How, and from whom, do we want to get travel content?
If you want travel content written by humans rather than bots, you’re gonna need to consciously seek it out and support it.
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AI has many uses and can be used in so many contexts. But what should its uses be when it comes to travel? Would you trust an AI travel influencer? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
AI-generated answers are not welcome.
Looking for more content on authentic travel experiences? Read my article on why I love walking tours while traveling next.
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