While traveling in Italy, I used ChatGPT as a tour guide as my mom and I wandered into interesting little corners, alleys, and buildings, where our curiosity was piqued without a tour guide.
Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC
As my mom and I stood under the hot Roman sun waiting for the 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 sends back a bunch of information in the form of bullet points, which is helpful but difficult to read. So I adjusted the prompts and gave ChatGPT more information.
“Pretend you’re a tour guide and tell me in a more interesting way,” I wrote.
In August, my mom and I were on an epic seven-city trip to celebrate her 60th birthday. She had no idea I was carrying a digital companion.
“Welcome, chef, to one of Rome’s most extraordinary treasures –pantheon”, the AI tool responded. (A few months ago, I asked ChatGPT to call me Chef to make the joke funnier.)
“As we stand in front of this architectural marvel, let me take you on a journey through time, where gods, emperors and artists all met in this sacred space,” the chatbot wrote.
Since its launch in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, boosting the company’s valuation along the way to an eye-popping $157 billion. According to Crunchbase data, artificial intelligence startups have raised $111 billion in funding since the beginning of 2023, and large technology companies have purchased millions of dollars in funding. NVIDIA processor to train artificial intelligence models. The generative artificial intelligence market is expected to Over $1 trillion Income over ten years.
However, for many everyday web users, figuring out how to use ChatGPT can be quite confusing.
I use ChatGPT a lot. Almost every week, I give it a list of five movies I want to see and force it to pick one for me. I recently had it draft a contract and asked it to summarize long articles.
But by far my favorite use case for ChatGPT was working as a tour guide in Italy.
“Look up as you enter,” the chatbot wrote as we began our tour of the Pantheon. “Chef, that dome is simply a masterpiece. It’s the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and it’s already It’s been like this for nearly two thousand years.”
ChatGPT’s 400 words of text definitely rivaled the audio tour we purchased, although the headphone version did include our tickets.
Elsewhere on our trip, ChatGPT told us that the central figure of the Trevi Fountain is Neptune riding the chariot of a sea horse, and explained why Rome’s Olympic Stadium still houses a monument to Benito Mussolini.
“This particular monument has been preserved in part because it is considered a historical artifact,” the chatbot said.
ChatGPT explains to us why truffles are such a common ingredient in Florentine cuisine, and how Archduke Maximilian I of Austria served as Governor of Lombardy-Venice in Milan and was later appointed Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III.
While working as a tour guide in Rome, ChatGPT pointed out Michelangelo’s Christ the Redeemer statue in the Basilica of Our Lady of Minerva in Rome.
Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC
We still need tour guides. at present
If you’re worried about the future of the guided tour industry, rest assured, we use a lot of guided tours across Italy.
In Vatican City, our tour guide Amy did a fantastic job cutting through the long lines to get through security and into the Holy City. She showed us art throughout the Vatican and prepared us for our visit to the Sistine Chapel.
She also did something technology couldn’t – she spun the Sfera con Sfera art structure in the Vatican’s Pinecone Courtyard. Spinning the giant bronze ball is the prerogative of the Vatican’s trusted tour guides.
My mother and I are grateful to the tour guide who took us to see the cremation site of Julius Caesar in Rome and to the tour guide who took us on a boat tour of the five towns in Cinque Terre. The guide also takes us through Tuscan vineyards, a hidden courtyard in Venice (where the climax of Casino Royale was filmed), and George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como.
But there are also many times when we wander into interesting little corners, alleys and buildings and satisfy our curiosity through the use of ChatGPT.
Perhaps the best example of this is when we leave the Pantheon and cross the Piazza into the Basilica of Our Lady of Minerva. The church is free to enter, but we knew little about it. So I asked ChatGPT.
“This is one of the few Gothic churches in Rome, hidden behind the Pantheon and filled with treasures that tell the story of this city where antiquity meets the divine,” the chatbot writes.
Among these treasures is a sculpture near the altar of the church.
“On your left you will find one of the church’s most famous works of art – Michelangelo’s Christ the Redeemer,” says ChatGPT. “This stunning statue shows Christ holding the cross with a gentle, almost calm expression. It is a powerful piece that captures both the humanity and divinity of Christ, and it is amazing that it was built by the Sistine The church was carved by the same hands.
A week later, my mom and I had to fight other tourists to get a clean photo of Michelangelo’s David in Florence. But in a church in Rome, we stood alone with a friendly chatbot in front of a historical statue by the same artist.
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