Rediscovering the Soul of Travel Writing & Photography 2025

Sivani Babu, Pauline Frommer, Bri Sneller & Elizabeth Lasley (Moderator)

Generative artificial intelligence is reshaping the travel writing market, offering helpful tools while posing competitive challenges and raising ethical questions about authenticity and originality. Sneller called it theft.

Pauline Frommer said Amazon is flooded with AI-generated travel guidebooks that scrape information off the web. She mentioned a travel guidebook on France, authored by a mysterious “Mike Steves,” who vaguely sounds like Rick Steves but isn’t. The New York Times quoted Frommer and the real Rick Steves on this seemingly fake author in an investigative piece entitled “A New Frontier for Travel Scammers: A.I.-Generated Guidebooks.” The NYT could find no information on Mike Steves and concluded the book, author, and photo were AI-generated.

Meanwhile, Frommer noted that Google’s new AI-generated summaries also reduced book sellers’ revenues due to fewer click-throughs.

Sivani Babu, a former public defender and now Co-founder and co-CEO of Hidden Compass, worries that journalism will act out of fear over AI and fail to establish AI policies and guidelines. “We do need government regulation, but it won’t save the credibility of journalists.” She advises writers to read their contracts with publications carefully.