We Asked AI to Take Us On a Tour of Our Cities. It Was Chaos

With high hopes of finding some hidden gems in our home cities and 100 ( 77) each burning a hole in our pockets, we--Natasha Bernal in London and Amanda Hoover in New York--asked AI to plan out the perfect day. We decided to use Littlefoot, an AI-powered local discovery chatbot that can generate experiences in 161 cities around the world. It was created by Bigfoot, a startup founded by former Airbnb executives Alex Ward, James Robinson, and Shane Lykins that purports to enmesh the minds of all the publicly available AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Anthropic, and Perplexity, in addition to 50 information sources such as Tripadvisor and Google. Bigfoot claims to use three different language models as "AI agents" to create itineraries. We told Littlefoot our respective starting points, dates, and times, and introduced some caveats: Amanda asked that her New York tour be dog-friendly; Natasha was obsessed with avoiding London's crowded tourist hotspots.