Here's your new job sharer

Emma is the face of AI – in German tourism circles, anyway. How does she – and it - write and sound?

A couple of years ago, I worked with Lonely Planet on some new ideas for the venerable ‘blue spine’ guidebooks.

It was an exciting experience for me and an interesting choice for them.

Here’s a generalisation about travel writing. There are two camps. The first mob are schooled in the guidebook style. They are travellers who gravitate towards writing.

The second comes from the school of newspaper features and magazine journalism. They are writers who gravitate towards travel.

I’m from the second school. I was a good decade into my journalism career – I’d been a reporter, a diary writer, a sports columnist, a media commentator and an interviewer – before I wrote my first travel article. At that stage, I was only averagely well-travelled. But a new travel editor at my newspaper had a radical idea that any decent writer should be able to write about places and holidays. So we generalists were offered travel gigs: and we didn’t say no.

A few decades of writing and editing travel later, I went into the Lonely Planet gig with a roundhead/cavalier dichotomy in my head. They – guidebook people – are all about facts; I am all about opinion. They do information; I do colour. They tell the reader what a place has; I tell you what it means.

Then, one day, I realised that way of thinking was utter bollocks.

We were working on the back of the book. I’d got my way and persuaded the guys to include a series of essay-length pieces called Storybook, where writers could take some random aspect of a destination and show how that helps unlock the place and its people. It might be the Portuguese obsession with football. It could be why TV sitcoms matter so much to the British. Or – this is one I actually got to write – why the Central mid-levels escalator is a microcosm of Hong Kong.

Then we got onto the question of factual information. The guidebooks’ back sections had always been full of it – currency, ferry timetables, dress codes, which adaptors to take and so on. Those pages fattened up already hefty books. Were they even necessary in a world where a single online click tells you everything you needed to know?

The challenge, then, was to assemble useful facts and info in a way that told a unique story about the place. Sandie Kestell, Destination Editor for Central & Eastern Europe, was sent away to test the theory on her specialist subject, Germany.

She came back with a dozen or so factoids. In Bavaria, it’s impolite to say guten tag for ‘good morning’. Bavaria is big, she found – bigger than Ireland or Denmark. The Bavarians classify beer as a staple food, not as alcohol. No-one ever jaywalks in Germany. In the country as a whole, when someone asks how are you? they expect a proper answer. Germans also expect to make quite intense eye contact during conversation.

I asked AI to give me some interesting facts about Germany and it told me the country is the largest milk producer in the EU.

One up to the humans. And there’s something energising about the material Sandie sourced, isn’t there? You feel smarter and better prepared for your trip to Munich. And even if you’re not going to Munich, you get to muse on the interesting differences between cultures. In England, for example, the definition of a bore is someone who, when asked ‘how are you?’ goes ahead and tells you. As for maintaining eye contact, that won’t go down well in many African countries, where it’s considered very rude indeed.

My dichotomy fell apart. The skill in travel writing isn’t just describing, it’s also truffling out facts that open up a place and its people. I notice how a writer like Jan Morris uses lists of things to build up a picture of a place like a pointillist artist.

Since then, I’ve based whole trips on a single fact. Last year, I went to southern Ontario solely because I discovered, to my surprise and, more significantly, to my editors’, that it was on the same latitude as the French Riviera.

A typical Canadian in familiar landscape

But hang on – isn’t this a case for AI to take over the job? After all, it has trillions of facts it can access in a nano-second. What hope for humans? Time we met Emma, our new job share.

Talking of Germany…

When my football team, Liverpool, was performing poorly (this was some time ago), they hired a French manager called Gérard Houllier. Rather than sack the poor guy currently in place, who’d been a stalwart of the club for years, the club made them act as joint managers for a spell before the inevitable happened and Houllier took sole charge.

I thought of that when, last October, I saw that the German National Tourist board had hired a new content writer called Emma. Forbes reported that Emma is ‘an AI-generated avatar billed as an innovative, interactive brand ambassador created to convince travellers to visit Germany’.

Would Emma replace the human writers currently doing the job. Nein!

‘Emma will operate in conjunction with our established influencer marketing structures,’ said Petra Hedorfer, CEO of the GNTB.

Liverpool were also adamant there job share plan was certainly not a temporary measure. If I were an established influencer marketing structure in Germany tourism, I’d be polishing my CV.

But while they are sharing the workload, let’s see what skills each, human and robot, bring to the party.

I pitted Emma against Sandie in a battle to find the most interesting facts and to check the ones the human writer had unearthed.

Should I stare at people in Germany? I asked Emma.

I cannot answer this question with my Germany.Travel based knowledge, she replied.

Is Bavaria bigger than Ireland?

I cannot answer this question with my Germany.Travel based knowledge, said Emma.

Is jaywalking illegal in Germany?

I cannot answer this question with my Germany.Travel based knowledge, said Emma.

Is beer alcohol?

Emma replied: Thanks for asking, but I don't drink at work.😌

Germany is known for its white wines, especially from regions like Mosel, Rheinhessen, and the Palatinate. Riesling is one of the country’s most famous grape varieties.🍇

Well, no-one is fooled by jolly emojis any longer, are they? And someone with a sense of humour has obviously programmed Emma to say something funny when the subject of alcohol comes up, even if she sidestepped the actual question and, rather like a practised politician, got in her preferred talking point instead.

AI tells me that the German for ‘dimwit’ is Schwachkopf. I won’t use that word about Emma, though: even bots deserve a little safeguarding.

I finally asked for some interesting facts about Germany and got told a lot of stuff about a bridge in Regensburg. More usefully, she sent me to a page actually called Interesting facts about Germany. It was really good and written by human beings.

How do I know? You can just tell.

What is AI bots had emotions? How would they sound?

Let’s look at what a distinctly human approach to information reads like.

I’ve been reading a novel that made me ask the question, how does Artificial Intelligence write – what is its style?

The easy answer is ‘however you want it to and whatever you want it to be’.

Which may be the case. But even in its – what, not-even-adolescence? – you can decode the default tone and syntax of the typical AI answer.

Here’s one:

In his post-apocalyptic novel Juice, Tim Winton explores the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI) being developed in humanoid form and used as an enemy. The book also explores themes of refugees, exile, and xenophobia.

Juice is considered a climate fiction novel that explores the consequences of climate change and the actions of those who contribute to it.

The book explores the experiences of refugees and the xenophobia they face.

The writing is fine, isn’t it? The syntax is nice and simple. The punctuation is solid. There’s an easy rhythm to the sentences. The tone is neutral and sober. If this writing were by a human author, I’d guess they were a well-educated person. English isn’t their first language, but they have mastered it rather better than many native speakers.

As for the content, it happens to be bollocks. In Juice, Winton’s AI-powered humanoids are not the enemy: they are the good guys. They – he calls them ‘Sims’ – have a physical superiority over real humans, which is useful on a planet and in a country (Australia) where global warming has gone haywire and life is barely sustainable for carbon-based lifeforms. The Sims are loyal and self-sacrificing. They are capable of making moral decisions in a world that seems to both pre-date and post-date the Abrahamic codes that used to underpin that society.

I’m interested in how they speak – or, to be clearer, the words Tim Winton chooses to put in their polymer mouths.

The book is narrated mostly in dialogue. The human characters speak in short, parched sentences, as if language itself is a precious resource to be used meanly and sparingly. The Sims, too, don’t waste words.

We require sunlight [says one Sim]. And we desire more than a life in storage. We dream and we wait. But we need to make and do. This is our purpose…

Storage is oblivion. In storage, our dreams of making escape us. Sir, they shrink.

They speak as servants who have come to realise their masters have let them down.

Winton is up to something really interesting here. He is taking the careful formality of AI prose and asking what happens if that’s overlaid with emotion and needs – longing, attachment, caring? That’s counterpointed with a human voice that has become cracked, utilitarian and brutalised.