Traveling through Italy, I used ChatGPT as a tour guide for the moments where my mom and I wandered into interesting little corners, alleys and buildings where our curiosity was piqued with no tour guide around.
As I stood with my mom under the blistering sun in Rome waiting for our audio tour of the Pantheon to begin, I decided to kill some time with ChatGPT.
"Tell me about the Pantheon in Rome," I said.
The AI tool returned a bunch of information in bullet points that was helpful but hardly made for an interesting read. So I tweaked my prompt and gave ChatGPT a bit more info.
"Pretend you're a tour guide and tell that to me in a more interesting fashion," I wrote.
My mom and I were in the midst of an epic seven-city trip in August to celebrate her 60th birthday. She had no idea that I was bringing along a digital companion.
"Welcome, Chef, to one of Rome's most extraordinary treasures -- The Pantheon," the AI tool responded. (I asked ChatGPT to refer to me as Chef several months earlier to make the banter more entertaining.)
"As we stand here in front of this architectural marvel, let me take you on a journey back in time, where gods, emperors, and artists all intersect in this sacred space," the chatbot wrote.
Since its launch in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT has revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, along the way lifting the company's valuation to an eye-popping $157 billion. AI startups have raised $111 billion in funding since the start of 2023, according to Crunchbase, and big tech companies have bought millions of Nvidia's processors to train AI models. The generative AI market is predicted to surpass $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Yet, for many everyday internet users, figuring out what to even do with ChatGPT can be quite perplexing.
I use ChatGPT quite a bit. Almost weekly, I give it a list of five movies I want to watch and force it to pick one for me. I recently had it draw up a contract, and I've asked it to summarize long articles.
But my favorite ChatGPT use case so far has been as a tour guide in Italy.
"When you enter, look up," the chatbot wrote, as we began our Pantheon visit. "That dome, Chef, is nothing short of a masterpiece. It's the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and it's been like that for almost two millennia."
ChatGPT's 400-word write up was absolutely on par with the audio tour we had purchased, though the headset version did include our tickets for entrance.
Elsewhere on our trip, ChatGPT told us that the central figure of the Trevi Fountain was Neptune riding a chariot pulled by sea horses, and explained why Rome's Stadio Olimpico still maintained a monument for Benito Mussolini.
"This particular monument has remained, partly because it is seen as a historical artifact," the chatbot said.
ChatGPT explained to us about why truffles were such a common ingredient in Florence's cuisine and how Austrian Archduke Maximilian I served as viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia in Milan before later being installed as emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III.
