Let this be a lesson for you, travel friends – AI is still not all that great.
Sure, it’s pretty awesome when we need a picture of an orange cat smoking a cigar while laying on a purple lounge chair, next to a swimming pool and ChatGPT gives you this:
And all sorts of places are using AI to help them with their respective businesses. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes not so much (Delta, you SURE you’re not making airline prices based on individual purchasing in the past, thanks to AI?). But that doesn’t mean AI is good for everything yet.
I’m sure you’ve heard of circumstances where AI has outright lied about stuff.
And even if it’s not outright lying, AI still has a very high chance of giving horrible advice. Or, in one traveling woman’s case, didn’t give enough advice.
Mery Caldass is an influencer from Spain. And apparently she missed her flight to Puerto Rico earlier this month.
She didn’t oversleep.
She wasn’t late getting to the airport.
Nope, she missed her flight because she didn’t have the right paperwork prepared that someone from the EU would typically need to fly to Puerto Rico. And she didn’t have it ready because she had asked ChatGPT for travel advice.
“I asked ChatGPT and he said no,” Caldass said, in Spanish, about whether she would need a visa to make the journey to Puerto Rico.
Of course, someone traveling from Spain to Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States, WOULDN’T need a visa. But they would need a visa waiver, called an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). According to the State Department, an ESTA is an online application that determines the eligibility of visitors to enter the United States. It’s the same as when we get an ETA to enter the UK or will eventually need an ETIAS to enter Europe.
Anyway, it might have behooved Caldass to figure out if she needed anything else to enter a U.S. territory, even if it wasn’t necessarily a visa. But no, ChatGPT told her she didn’t need a visa and she thought she was done.
“That’s what I get for not getting more information,” the influencer said through tears. “I don’t trust that one [her AI assistant] anymore.”
Caldass added that she sometimes insults ChatGPT — she calls it derogatory names — and that she thought maybe giving her incorrect information was “his revenge.”
No, it was just her not doing her homework. Which is exactly what many of the replies to her TikTok video said:
- “Why didn’t you use Google?”
- ChatGPT can’t fill the empty cavity.
- “Conclusion: For that kind of thing, first, ask the appropriate entities and/or institutions, not the AI.”
- “Is education illegal?”
Here’s her video where she told her story of woe:
@merycaldass si hay una revolución de las IAs voy a ser la primera 4niquil-hada🧚♀️
There was a happy ending, by the way. Caldass apparently got her ducks in a row because the next day she was showing a video of her and her travel partner at a Bad Bunny concert in Puerto Rico. So I guess it was a happy ending.
But yeah…for now, at least. If you’re going to use ChatGPT to learn something, make sure you have a backup, too.
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2 comments
Fake drama for clicks. Sad state of today’s world. She magically got everything fixed in a day? Hmmmmmm
Well, to be fair, ESTAs are typically approved within minutes. 😉 I’m not saying she didn’t do the video for clicks…of course she did. But the “fix” could easily have allowed her to be in PR by the next day.