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Guidebooks Written by AI Bots

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This topic was touched on previously here https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/tourist-scams/a-i-generated-guidebooks-scam-online but it's absolutely worth a bump due to the massive proliferation of these types of useless travel guides flooding social media and Amazon

I was first made aware when a fellow user of a Facebook travel page mentioned a "really awesome guidebook" he had come across about Vietnam. It sounded great, and here was a fellow traveler saying he had used the book and loved it. So I searched amazon and there it was.. and lo and behold the author had other guidebooks - Venice, the Italian Riviera, Spain, Amsterdam, Bath England, Glasgow, and Phoenix?? Just a weird combo of destinations and the books either had no reviews or very low reviews. I clicked on samples in them and they all had the same weird stilted language, very short, surface-y content and no original photos.

"Carolyn B Mathis", "Betty Caulfield" and maybe the most prolific "author", "Roy McKean" are good examples of this brand of useless guidebook.

Posted by
4713 posts

And it is not a simple matter of wasting some dollars--one of the most alarming things I have read is about AI created mushroom identification books/AI apps containing incorrect info that could be fatal. Let the buyer beware...

Posted by
7766 posts

I wonder whether any of them contain useable maps. Or do they just feature superficial descriptions of a place, maybe a couple statistics, and some (probably common and familiar) photos? No Bot or programmer/compiler actually went to the destination to gather first-hand information.

Rick Steves and his crew do extensive research, to advise travel through the “back door.” AI guidebooks would seem to be travel through the “Trap Door!”

Posted by
496 posts

Take a look at the samples. No original artwork, photography, maps or charts. Everything is scraped from open source material.

Each “topic” is typically a single paragraph of the most general 30,000-foot stuff an AI query could spit out.

Hopping back to see if I could copy a sample, I found another one - “Cecil England” - totally a real person and not a made-up pseudonym (.-.)

Posted by
3836 posts

The pseudonym, "Betty Caulfield" listed in your post is almost certainly a reference to Holden Caulfield, one of the most famous characters in literary history....He's the main character in the book "Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger.
I'm sure whoever is putting these together "borrowed" half of that name.

These sound terrible!!
Estimated Prophet, sorry about your wasted money on one of these so-called guidebooks.

I'll stick to buying guidebooks by Rick Steves, Lonely Planet and Rough guides. These are all available at half price from used bookstores and of course on Ebay.

Posted by
1599 posts

This doesn't just apply to guidebooks, but fake web blogs, newspaper articles, and videos. We need to be aware of junk out there.

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