Why We Don’t Use AI On Our Travel Blog: The 5 Key Reasons

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world as we know it. It’s the industrial revolution of The Information Age. Many job sectors are going to be heavily impacted, and a lot of traditional job roles will change significantly. But while AI might bring benefits to certain industries like healthcare, finance and security, it’s also an inevitable and inescapable threat to creatives around the world.

In this guide based entirely on our own experiences, we’re going to walk you through the 5 major reasons we are so reluctant to use AI on our travel blog, which includes all of our free travel guides, the travel guidebooks we sell in our online store and every photograph you’ll find on our site.

1. AI Gives You 100% Plagiarized Information

Any time you ask ChatGPT a question, you type a search query into Google or you use an AI travel planning tool, you’ll receive results or answers that are derived entirely from information that’s already available on the web. So, let’s say you search Google or ask Chat ChatGPT “how to plan a 2 day Paris itinerary“. The AI overview results or the AI answer you’ll receive has been scraped from blogs, news outlets, forums and other domains on the internet. Remember, AI tools can’t create new ideas, perspectives or experiences. They can only take what’s already been published onto the web.

Now, we’ve always written 100% original content. It’s something we pride ourselves on. We don’t look at our competition when writing similar guides because we want to give our readers a consistent experience in our own style, so our audience can immediately tell it’s our work. But we know other travel blogs have copied our work over the years (when you’ve done this long enough, you know when someone has used your work as a template and built from it) and it’s incredibly frustrating.

So how could we in good conscience go and use AI tools to create our guides when we know it would effectively be scraping information from other people’s hard work? We’d be hypocrites. Even if we edited the AI produced guide, it would still have a skeleton based on what others have already published. And if we prompted AI to rewrite the guide 100 times, it’s still only capable of using what’s already on the web. It wouldn’t match our consistent style of writing, and it would completely alter the way we had originally intended to publish a piece of work that’s meant to be consistent and helpful for our readers, all based on our experiences.

2. It Defeats The Whole Point

Let’s take things back to basics. Our passion, philosophy and business objective has always been simple: To help people travel. That’s why we do what we do. So are we really helping people travel to a new place if we ask an AI tool to create our guide for us? No, anyone can do that without ever leaving home. The way we help people travel is by going to the place ourselves, writing the guide ourselves and using the real photos we took on our trip. It’s personable, accurate, authentic, tried and tested by real experts.

We were inspired to start our travel blog when we first traveled the world for 18 months from 2018-2019 because we used other blogs to figure out what was worth doing in a new place. And we thought wow this is amazing and we’d be great at it. The reason we liked to use blogs was because we knew the writers had actually been to the place themselves. AI hasn’t been to Patagonia, the Amalfi Coast or New York City. It doesn’t have any anecdotes or unique tips.

Here’s how we create an authentic travel guide:

1. We spend our own time, money and energy exploring a destination.
2. We visit attractions, restaurants and hotels to gather helpful information.
3. We take countless photos or videos to show our readers real experiences.
4. We spend days creating guides filled with first-hand information.

We don’t want to sit in front of a computer prompting an AI software program to “add more humor”, “add 200 more words” or worse yet “write a 2,000 word guide on how to spend 2 days in Paris”. What’s the point being a travel writer? AI tools remove the personable, human element from travel planning. They can’t offer real-world experiences. They can’t adjust, adapt and tailor individual travel itineraries or have a conversation with a real person like we can. It’s sad to say, but there’s a real possibility that the rise of AI is going to diminish the art of travel writing.

And ask yourself these questions: Would you rather see a real photo of a place exactly like you’d see it if you visited in person? Or would you rather see a fabricated AI generated photo of a place, then be disappointed when you arrive? One of our biggest pet-peeves is when we see an amazing photo of a place but it looks nothing like that in real life. Our travel photos are authentic. Real.

3. The Technology Isn’t Ready

When the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton and current top experts in the tech like Elon Musk tell us that AI isn’t even close to being ready, or that AI has the potential to be dangerous to the human race, why do tech giants bury their heads in the sand and push forward at light speed? Microsoft, Google and lots of new competitors have essentially brought AI forward by decades.

Don’t get us wrong, we like getting a new iPhone with some nice small upgrades since the last version. But when it comes to AI, it’s like we’ve gone straight from the Nokia 3210 to the iPhone 15 pro max in one go. It’s too great a leap to get right, and the fallout is a broken internet which is negatively impacting on how we search for information online.

You can easily find dozens of funny and quite frankly outlandish examples of AI “answers” on the internet and on social media. But in all seriousness, we actually feel sorry for people traveling to new places now because the current top search results are confusing, wrong or from untrustworthy sources. Here’s a recent example of our own from when we were doing research for a trip to Paris:

• Search query: Busiest time at Versailles
• AI overview answer: The Palace of Versailles is busiest on weekends, especially Tuesdays, and is closed on Mondays. Weekends are about twice as busy as weekdays, and 3-day weekends are three times busy. Sundays are busier than Saturdays. Fridays and Saturdays are also equally busy, along with national holidays.

Okay. So, is it busier on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays? If it’s busiest on weekends, how can Friday be as busy as Saturday? If weekends are twice as busy as weekdays, how can Tuesday be especially busy? It’s just not helpful. We weren’t asking for a riddle to solve.

We were also planning to hike a series of short trails in our local area recently, and an AI result showed that one of the trails was 33 miles long, when it was actually 0.3 miles long. Anyone else reading that AI “answer” without investigating further by clicking onto a blog post or guide written by someone who actually did the hike would absolutely miss that trail because they thought it was over 30 miles.

And guess what? If a blogger or website owner used an AI tool to write a guide including that hike, they’d pull in the same incorrect information. If that information isn’t double checked by the writer, they would also publish that the hike is 33 miles long. Unfortunately, that’s where the internet is heading. An endless cycle of misinformation and incorrect “answers” to your search queries.

These billion dollar backed AI companies hope it will improve over time, but how long will it take until it’s accurate? In the meantime during their experiments, we all suffer the consequences as searchers of helpful information.

4. AI Has Already Broken The Internet

Even before those eyebrow-raising overviews began appearing, AI had already played a major role in reshaping (we would say breaking) the internet as we know it. Websites used to be ranked in part by human moderators, but now AI tools alone perform algorithm updates which rank websites across the entire internet. And recent algorithm updates have had a profound impact on the internet and small business creatives like us. Most website owners, SEO experts or even people who surf the web regularly will tell you that search results are the worst they’ve ever been.

We can’t find accurate information or helpful guides written by true experts in the top search results for most of the travel queries we search for. It was a much better experience just a few years ago. Sure, we’re biased because it’s our opinion that blogs provide the most valuable information. But putting bias aside, we genuinely struggle to find answers we trust within the top results since the change to AI ranking systems. We feel compelled to double, triple and quadruple check answers because we just don’t trust the sites ranking at the top of search results anymore.

Small publishers like us and thousands of others once had a symbiotic relationship with search engines. The status quo between publisher, reader and search engine was in balance. Of course it wasn’t perfect, but at least some results on the first pages led users to a source that had actually been to that place, done that workout or made that recipe. As it stands in its current state, the parameters used to engineer AI ranking systems have resulted in a strange new internet that, at least in our opinion, no longer truly helps the searcher.

5. We Love To Write Travel Guides

Let’s end with the most close-to-our-hearts reason we don’t use AI: We love to write travel guides. It sounds cliche, but writing travel guides is why we started our blog, it’s what we’ve done since 2018 and it’s what we’d like to continue doing. Yes, we know change is inevitable, but in our opinion AI is not changing the creative industry for the better. Just look at the Hollywood strikes, the Scarlett Johansson voice story and all the deepfake issues with elections all caused by AI.

Tens of thousands of blogs like ours will be forced to dramatically alter their business plans if AI takes the place of journalism or travel writing because internet search traffic is our bread and butter. It would be like AI taking the place of a mechanic by fixing all technical issues with a car, so the mechanic is left with nothing but decals and paint jobs. Or like AI performing all operations on patients, so surgeons are left with nothing but headaches and colds. AI tools are essentially eliminating the primary function of our job role.

Let’s get one thing straight. This is not us rising up against AI in some sort of defiant battle stance. We know we’d lose the war. But in the end it all comes down to personal preference, and we don’t want to use AI to write our travel guides because it takes the purpose, the fun and the personality out of being a creative. We spent 6 years traveling the world so we could write about our experiences in our own words. Not the machine generated words of a software program.

So no matter how much it might speed up our output, or no matter how much our competition is using AI and leaving us in the dust, we just can’t bring ourselves as travel writers to have a machine produce a guide for us in a matter of seconds. You might think it’s naive or that we should accept the inevitable and embrace the technology. Adapt to survive. But we know we wouldn’t have wanted to filter through inaccurate machine written words when we first traveled the world back in 2018, so why should travelers today have to deal with the minefield that is AI generated information?

More Personal Guides

• 10 things we love about having an online business
• 10 things we don’t like about having an online business
• 10 things we love about long term travel
• 10 things we don’t like about long term travel
• What it’s like to travel when pregnant

Want to learn more about us? Head over to our about Where Are Those Morgans page to meet Mark and Kristen.

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We hope our take on why we won’t use AI resonates in some way with you!

AI is one of those things that really splits opinion. Some are vehemently behind it, while others don’t want anything to do with it. We’re not saying we don’t want AI to help where it can, but we certainly don’t want millions of creatives around the world to be out of a job.

Remember, these are our opinions, based on our experiences and preferences. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments below.

Happy Travels,

Mark and Kristen

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