The systems take an enormous amount of investment, data and human work to create, she said, so it will be more efficient to build on top of them. A travel insurance company, for example, could build a system using the natural-language capabilities of software like ChatGPT that would help travelers choose the most appropriate policies or guide them through the process of submitting claims.

Generative A.I. could also improve foreign-language translation, potentially helping travelers conduct conversations with local people, Dr. Caliskan said. And combined with virtual reality technology, it could also allow travel companies to give customers a preview “visit” of a destination using a virtual reality headset, without leaving home.

Fearing an ‘A.I. junk land’

Jeff Low, the chief executive of Stash Hotels Rewards, a company that awards loyalty points for staying at a set of independent hotels, worries about the effect new A.I. like ChatGPT may have on the lodging industry. If one promise of artificial intelligence is automating routine tasks so that workers can personally connect with guests, “the reality is different,” Mr. Low said. Hotels have already been more likely to cut jobs when A.I. was introduced, he said, for example, reducing front desk staff when automated check-in became popular. “Interacting with people is an important part of travel,” he said. “And hotels can differentiate themselves through those connections.”

Mr. Low also worries that unethical companies could use software like ChatGPT to undermine the value of guest reviews on travel sites, information many rely on to make hotel choices. This kind of software could make it easier for so-called review farms — which create fake positive or negative postings — to become more sophisticated, perhaps even creating traveler profiles that will pump out seemingly legitimate reviews over months and years, he said. Travel companies have systems to weed out fake reviews, he said, “but if a college professor can’t tell if a bot wrote a student’s paper, how will Tripadvisor know if a review is legitimate?”

There are other potential downsides as the capabilities of generative A.I. are used by more travel providers. A natural-language answer sounds very authoritative, “so people will believe it more than they should,” Mr. Burt said. And because Google loves fresh content when it comes to ranking search results, companies that want to raise their internet profiles may start using ChatGPT-like software to write an ever-larger raft of blog and social media posts. The internet “might become an A.I. junk land,” Mr. Burt said.