A travel writer considers whether AI can help you navigate the greatest city on earth (spoiler: maybe, but mind the gap)
By Fiona MacLeod | London travel, tourism, and the eternal question of where to eat near a museum without spending your entire holiday budget.
Sources: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
AI Comes to London: The Travel Implications
The news that OpenAI has opened a London office prompts a practical question from the travel writer’s perspective: can AI actually help you visit London better? I have tested this. The results are mixed in ways I find genuinely instructive.
I asked an AI assistant to plan a day in London for a first-time visitor. It gave me: the Tower of London, Borough Market, a walk along the South Bank, and dinner in Covent Garden. This is a perfectly good day. It is also the day that approximately forty thousand other tourists are having simultaneously. The AI has learned from the internet and the internet loves Borough Market. The internet is not wrong about Borough Market but it is also not telling you about the fishmonger in Chapel Market, N1, who has been trading since 1987 and where the fish is fresher and the queue is shorter and the conversation is free.
What AI Does Well for the London Visitor
It is excellent on transport. Ask it the best route from Paddington to the South Kensington museums and it will tell you correctly (take the Circle or District line, two stops, you’re done). It is excellent on opening hours, entry prices, and the kind of factual scaffolding that takes time to research. The official Visit London website covers this too, reliably and well.
What AI is less good at is the texture of London: the specific light on Waterloo Bridge at 7am, the way Brixton Market smells on a Saturday, the pub that has been there since Dickens was wandering these streets and still charges a reasonable price for a pint of bitter. These things require being there. They require walking.
My Recommendation
Use the AI for logistics. Use your feet for discovery. London, as the AI age accelerates, remains fundamentally a city for walking. Plan your route by tube. Then wander off it. Every street in this city has a story. None of them are on the first page of search results. Go find them.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/openai-opens-london-office/
More travel notes at The Daily Mash
