Hot Travel Destinations Get Deepfaked

Tourists are increasingly being duped into visiting places that don’t actually exist — fake travel destinations generated by AI.

Why It Hurts: Generating a person using AI has, sadly, become commonplace… but generating a place is a new thing entirely. As online personalities spread misinformation about hot tourism spots, travelers will need to be more vigilant about not planning trips or booking tickets to non-existent places — especially if they’re using a chatbot to build their next itinerary.

Behind the Itinerary: An elderly Malaysian couple recently learned the hard way that a cable car attraction in the town of Kuak Hulu was not real.

• They showed up at a hotel and asked someone on staff about where to purchase tickets for the cable car, showing them a pretty realistic news video of the attraction filled with tourists.
• The staff member, confused, told them there was no cable car — it turns out that the video, posted by news channel “TV Rakyat,” was generated using Google Veo 3.
• The couple, who had driven three hours to ride the cable car, considered suing the newscaster in the video, only to learn that she was a deepfake and the news organization, TV Rakyat, was fabricated. Yikes.

Last Stop: Fast Company notes that AI-generated tourism spots are a scary evolution of the “manufactured reality” already present on social media — like influencers posting selfies at iconic landmarks that make it seem like they’re the only ones there. In reality, they’ve simply cropped or edited out the crowds around them. That practice has fueled a surge in tourism to those same spots, with travelers thinking they’ll be relatively empty… only to learn that thousands of other people had the same idea.

That selfie-tourism has a profound impact (mostly negative) on real global landmarks. But faking all of that could introduce a whole new level of chaos — tricking people into flooding cities in search of a landmark that doesn’t exist in the first place. Our heads are already spinning at the thought.

Prediction: With AI travel influencers now a thing and countries rolling out their own AI-generated travel-marketing campaigns, don’t be surprised if some crafty criminals start inventing tourist hot spots as a way to scam — or even harm — international travelers.