As I stood with my mom under the blistering sun in Rome waiting for our audio tour of the Pantheon to begin, I decided to kill some time with ChatGPT.
“Tell me about the Pantheon in Rome,” I said.
The AI tool returned a bunch of information in bullet points that was helpful but hardly made for an interesting read. So I tweaked my prompt and gave ChatGPT a bit more info.
“Pretend you’re a tour guide and tell that to me in a more interesting fashion,” I wrote.
My mom and I were in the midst of an epic seven-city trip in August to celebrate her 60th birthday. She had no idea that I was bringing along a digital companion.
“Welcome, Chef, to one of Rome’s most extraordinary treasures—The Pantheon,” the AI tool responded. (I asked ChatGPT to refer to me as Chef several months earlier to make the banter more entertaining.)
“As we stand here in front of this architectural marvel, let me take you on a journey back in time, where gods, emperors, and artists all intersect in this sacred space,” the chatbot wrote.
Since its launch in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, along the way lifting the company’s valuation to an eye-popping $157 billion. AI startups have raised $111 billion in funding since the start of 2023, according to Crunchbase, and big tech companies have bought millions of Nvidia’s processors to train AI models. The generative AI market is predicted to surpass $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Yet, for many everyday internet users, figuring out what to even do with ChatGPT can be quite perplexing.
I use ChatGPT quite a bit. Almost weekly, I give it a list of five movies I want to watch and force it to pick one for me. I recently had it draw up a contract, and I’ve asked it to summarize long articles.
But my favorite ChatGPT use case so far has been as a tour guide in Italy.
“When you enter, look up,” the chatbot wrote, as we began our Pantheon visit. “That dome, Chef, is nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and it’s been like that for almost two millennia.”
ChatGPT’s 400-word write up was absolutely on par with the audio tour we had purchased, though the headset version did include our tickets for entrance.
Elsewhere on our trip, ChatGPT told us that the central figure of the Trevi Fountain was Neptune riding a chariot pulled by sea horses, and explained why Rome’s Stadio Olimpico still maintained a monument for Benito Mussolini.
“This particular monument has remained, partly because it is seen as a historical artifact,” the chatbot said.
ChatGPT explained to us about why truffles were such a common ingredient in Florence’s cuisine and how Austrian Archduke Maximilian I served as viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia in Milan before later being installed as emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III.
We still need tour guides. For now
If you’re worried about the future of the human tour guide industry, rest assured that we used plenty of them across Italy.
In Vatican City, our tour guide, Amy, did an excellent job cutting the enormous line to get through security and into the Holy City. She showed us the art throughout the Vatican and prepared us to see the Sistine Chapel.
She also did what technology never could — she spun the Sfera con Sfera art structure in the Vatican’s Courtyard of the Pinecone. Spinning the enormous bronze sphere is a privilege reserved for the Vatican’s trusted tour guides.
My mom and I were grateful for the guide who showed us the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated in Rome, and for the one who led a boat tour of the five towns of Cinque Terre. Human guides also led us through the vineyards in Tuscany, a hidden courtyard in Venice, where the climactic scene of “Casino Royale” was filmed, and George Clooney’s villa in Lake Como.
But there were numerous moments when we wandered into interesting little corners, alleys and buildings and were able to satisfy our curiosity by turning to ChatGPT.
Perhaps the best example came when we left the Pantheon and walked across the piazza into Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The church was free to enter but we knew very little about it. So I asked ChatGPT.
“Tucked away just behind the Pantheon, this is one of the few Gothic churches in Rome, and it’s filled with treasures that tell the story of a city where the ancient and the sacred come together,” the chatbot wrote.
Among those treasures was a sculpture near the church’s altar.
“To your left, you’ll find one of the church’s most famous artworks — Michelangelo’s Christ the Redeemer,” ChatGPT said. “This stunning statue shows Christ holding the cross, with a gentle, almost serene expression. It’s a powerful work that captures both the humanity and divinity of Christ, and it’s remarkable to think that it was sculpted by the same hands that created the Sistine Chapel.”
A week later, my mom and I would have to fight off other tourists just to get a clean photo of Michelangelo’s David in Florence. But at the church in Rome, we were alone, with our friendly chatbot, at a historical statue created by the same artist.