Abstract
This study explains the pros and cons of using ChatGPT in the tourism industry. Data obtained from interviews with professionals and consumers in the tourism industry have revealed that ChatGPT should not be evaluated solely from one aspect. Although using ChatGPT in the tourism industry offers significant advantages such as personalized holiday and travel recommendations, instant language translation, and the ability to provide 24/7 customer support, significantly enhancing the user experience, providing cultural information, increasing customer satisfaction by assisting in travel planning, etc., it also leads to potential disadvantages such as real-time and limitations in current data, inaccuracies in some cases and lack of a human touch to ensure the processing of sensitive information, ethical and security concerns, etc. As a result, the findings were compared and discussed with the results of the studies in the literature.
TopIntroduction
With the OpenAI research laboratory established in 2015 (Brockman et al., 2016), developments in artificial intelligence technology have accelerated, and many machine-learning products, including DALL-E and ChatGPT, have been made available to the public (Devlin et al.,2018). ChatGPT, a chatbot application based on Open AI's work on language processing technology, is a product of the GPT model series. It is formed from the expression word chat, which refers to the chat robot function, and the abbreviations of the GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) (Open AI, 2023; Sohail et al., 2023).
Open AI introduced the first GPT series with GPT-1 in 2018 to develop a language model that can be trained on large amounts of text data and used effectively in natural language processing tasks (OpenAI, 2023). In 2019, it developed GPT-2, which is very successful in text generation, classification, and other natural language processing tasks (Radford, 2019). This model laid the foundations of ChatGPT. The model is trained on large amounts of text data, allowing users to answer text-based questions and create a conversational model that can interact with people in natural language. The next version of ChatGPT is GPT-3, a larger model trained with more data than GPT-2. ChatGPT can better understand, produce text, and perform a wide range of natural language processing tasks in this model. Large language models like ChatGPT are complex AI systems trained on large data sets and continually improved. This highly advanced chatbot can handle various text-based requests, from answering simple questions to performing highly complex tasks (Liu et al., 2021).
ChatGPT, a large language model, can be trained on large data sets such as books, web pages, articles, text documents, chat records, and similar content, producing responses that are almost in line with natural human language (Lund & Wang, 2023). ChatGPT is used in many academic and scientific fields for many different purposes, from writing literature, creating content, and computer coding to getting medical diagnosis advice (Sohail et al., 2023). This study investigates how ChatGPT can be used in the tourism industry. In the following sections of the study, the opportunities created by ChatGPT and the risks and concerns it poses are discussed.
Key Terms in this Chapter
AI Technologies: Encompass various techniques and approaches, such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, expert systems, and reinforcement learning.
ChatGPT: A chatbot application based on Open AI's work on language processing technology, is a product of the GPT model series.
AI Planning: Involves developing algorithms that enable machines to plan and make decisions in complex, dynamic environments.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Is the simulation of human intelligence in machines programmed to think, learn, and perform tasks that typically require human intelligence ( Demir & Demir, 2023a ).
GPT: Is the abbreviation for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.