As AI advances, could it replace your travel agent? To investigate just how effective a holiday planner AI can be, MailOnline Travel asked two chatbots - ChatGPT, created by California AI firm OpenAI, and Google's Bard - to plan a variety of trips. Scroll down to see the answers the chatbots provided, from hotel recommendations in Iraq to advice on planning budget sun holidays, honeymoons and stag weekends away. For a budget break in the sun, Bard recommended jetting off to Bulgaria, where it says that you can find a week-long all-inclusive holiday'for as little as £200'. MailOnline Travel asked ChatGPT and Google's Bard to plan a variety of holidays.

When you go on a road trip, you pack snacks and drinks and make sure you have good music to queue. Climate scientist Katia Lamer, on the other hand, packs party balloons loaded with atmospheric sensors, then climbs into a laser-firing observatory on wheels. Lamer--director of operations at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing--recently completed a 1,700-mile road trip from Upton, New York, to Houston, Texas, in a specially designed science truck while taking a bevy of measurements, from air temperature to humidity to wind. The big plan: better understanding the complex climate dynamics of cities, where conditions can vary wildly not only from neighborhood to neighborhood, but door to door. "The big difference with urban environments is that they're much more heterogeneous than natural environments. What that means is that there are more elements, like individual buildings, that create these canyons," says Lamer, referring to the corridors between structures.

Air travel is speedy, and train travel is romantic, but road trips are where it's at if you want the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want. But planning your own road trip could be a thing of the past if artificial intelligence (AI) can help plan where to go and all the stops along the way. CarMax, the largest retailer of used cars in the US, surveyed over 1,000 people domestically and found out that 83 percent of respondents plan to go on a road trip this year. Then, they proceeded to see if AI technology could plan a better road trip than humans. They used an AI system called Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) to plan road trips with eight different goals, including best overall road trip, best road trip for couples, best cross-country road trip, best coastal road trip, best road trip for foodies, best summer road trip, best road trips for views, and, lastly, best road trip for visiting national monuments.

Ford is determined to counter GM's Super Cruise with its own take on hands-free highway driving, and that means conducting a rather extensive set of real-world tests. The automaker has revealed that it spent last year conducting the "mother of all road trips" for its upcoming BlueCruise system, sending five Mustang Mach-E crossovers and five F-150 trucks on a collective 110,000-mile journey across the US and Canada. The aim, to no one's surprise, was to gauge how BlueCruise handled in a wide range of realistic road and traffic conditions. Ford had already racked up 500,000 miles of development testing, but these were shorter, narrowly-focused dry runs. The road trips helped Ford look for changes in everything from road signs to weather while travelling cross-country.

Harro has over 20 years of experience in management consulting and early stage investments in disruptive products, processes and services. In many of the conversations with our (potential) customers, we discuss the power of artificial intelligence. In many publications the usage of AI is almost promoted as "the land of milk and honey" -- but those with a bit of experience will be able to tell you that using AI is not always the answer, and it's not as easy to implement as many try to make you believe. But with the right use-cases defined, it can help your company -- or you as a person -- make life easier or create specific added value. I'd like to tell you about how AI improved my personal life in five examples.

I live in a city filled with reminders of epic travelers from the historic journeys of Lewis and Clark to the cross country treks in automobiles along Route 66. There are still many icons around Saint Louis and across Missouri modern travelers can visit today. From Missouri's rolling hills and natural wonders explored by Lewis and Clark to the kitschy man-made attractions that helped make Route 66 a favorite for family road trips, the unique views make a Missouri road trip memorable. For blind travelers, this is a part of the trip they miss. A new prototype smart car window aims to change the experience by enabling blind or partially-sighted people to visualize passing scenery through touch.

Imagine you're on a cross-country road trip and you aren't sure how to get to your final destination. You have a paper map in the passenger seat, but you keep getting lost because you have to continuously pull over to study this very large and confusing map. Eventually, you arrive at your destination, albeit a bit frustrated, but getting there wasn't enjoyable, and it certainly wasn't efficient. Now imagine you're on the same road trip, but instead you're driving a car with a built-in GPS navigation system guiding you the entire time. The journey to your final destination will take considerably less time and make for a much more pleasant experience.

Last year, a novelist went on a road trip across the USA. The trip was an attempt to emulate Jack Kerouac--to go out on the road and find something essential to write about in the experience. There is, however, a key difference between this writer and anyone else talking your ear off in the bar. This writer is just a microphone, a GPS, and a camera hooked up to a laptop and a whole bunch of linear algebra. People who are optimistic that artificial intelligence and machine learning won't put us all out of a job say that human ingenuity and creativity will be difficult to imitate.

Artificial intelligence and a Cadillac have become buzzworthy book authors penning a Kerouacian novel about a road trip from New York to New Orleans. The artificial intelligence project was the brainchild of former Obama administration ghostwriter and creative technologist, hacker, Gonzo data scientist and artificial intelligence expert, Ross Goodwin. Goodwin told The Atlantic that the four sensors located on the car provided data for a system of neural networks that had been'trained' with Foursquare location data and hundreds of books, notably poetry, science fiction and'bleak' literature. The literary genres'represented the voice I wanted the book to be written in,' Goodwin said, noting that he wanted the voice to'match the terrain of our journey, its historical and literary significance.' The first thing the car AI wrote, upon being started up in Brooklyn, New York, was the moody line, 'It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy.'

A little over two years ago now I wrote a review for The Crew, Ubisoft's racing-game-slash-MMO hybrid, a game that touted all of America as its map. And it made good on that promise--I spent a long time just admiring the scenery contained therein. That's about all I admired though, because it was a pretty damn mediocre racing game. And here we are again, with The Crew 2. Another game with an identity crisis, of sorts. Another game where the map is the biggest draw--and it's a fantastic draw, let me say that up front.