Traveling around Italy, I used ChatGPT as a tour guide for the moments when my mom and I wandered into interesting little corners, alleyways, and buildings where our curiosity was piqued without any tour guide.
Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC
While standing with my mother in the hot sun in Rome waiting for our Pantheon audio tour to start, 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 were useful, but hardly made for interesting reading. So I changed my request and gave ChatGPT a bit more information.
“Pretend you’re a tour guide and tell me this in a more interesting way,” I wrote.
My mom and I were in the middle of an epic seven-city road trip in August to celebrate her 60th birthday. She had no idea I was bringing along a digital companion.
“Welcome, cook, to one of Rome’s most extraordinary treasures—The pantheon,” the AI tool replied. (I asked ChatGPT to refer to me as Chief a few months ago to make the joke more fun.)
“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 intersected 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 raising the company’s valuation to $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 processors to train AI models. The generative AI market is projected to exceed $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
However, for many everyday internet users, understanding what to even do with ChatGPT can be quite complicated.
I use ChatGPT quite a bit. Almost every week, I give him a list of five movies I want to watch and make him pick one for me. I recently drafted a contract and asked him to summarize long articles.
But my favorite use case for ChatGPT so far has been as a tour guide in Italy.
“When you enter, look up,” the chatbot wrote, as we began our tour of the Pantheon. “This dome, boss, is nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and has been for nearly two millennia.”
ChatGPT’s 400-word write-up was exactly the same as the audio tour we had purchased, although the headset version included our entry tickets.
Elsewhere on our trip, ChatGPT told us that the central figure of the Trevi Fountain was Neptune riding a chariot drawn by sea horses, and explained why Rome’s Stadio Olimpico still housed a monument to Benito Mussolini.
“This particular monument remains, in part because it is seen as a historical artifact,” the chatbot said.
ChatGPT explained to us why truffles were such a common ingredient in Florentine 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.
Acting as a tour guide in Rome, ChatGPT pointed out Michelangelo’s Christ the Redeemer in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.
Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC
We still need tour guides. For now
If you are concerned about the future of the human guide industry, rest assured that we have employed many of them throughout Italy.
In Vatican City, our tour guide, Amy, did a great job cutting the long line to get through security and into the Holy City. She showed us the art throughout the Vatican and prepared us to see the Sistine Chapel.
It also did what technology never could – it rotated the Sfera con Sfera art structure in the Vatican’s Court of Pines. Spinning the great bronze sphere is a privilege reserved for trusted Vatican tour guides.
My mother and I were grateful for the guide who showed us the place where Julius Caesar was burned in Rome and for the one who led a boat tour of the five towns of the Cinque Terre. Human guides also took us through vineyards in Tuscany, a hidden courtyard in Venice where the climactic scene of “Casino Royale” was filmed, and George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como.
But there were many moments when we wandered into interesting little corners, alleys and buildings and were able to satisfy our curiosity by turning to ChatGPT.
Perhaps the best example came when we left the Pantheon and walked across the piazza to Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The church was free to enter, but we knew very little about it. So I asked ChatGPT.
“Situated just behind the Pantheon, this is one of the few Gothic churches in Rome and is filled with treasures that tell the story of a city where the ancient and the sacred come together,” the chatbot wrote.
Among those treasures was a sculpture near the altar of the church.
“On your left, you’ll find one of the church’s most famous works of art – Michelangelo’s Christ the Redeemer,” ChatGPT said. “This stunning statue shows Christ carrying the cross, with a gentle, almost serene expression. It is a powerful work that captures both the humanity and divinity of Christ, and it is impressive to think that it was sculpted by the same hands that created the Chapel Sistine.”
A week later, my mom and I would have to fight other tourists just to get a clear shot of Michelangelo’s David in Florence. But in the church of Rome, we were alone, with our friendly chatbot, in a historic statue created by the same artist.
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