This report aims to answer those questions, by providing a general introduction to Artificial Intelligence technology, its business applications and its relevance to Travel & Tourism.
BRIEF HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
AI has gained significant attention in recent years – and especially in 2023 – but AI is not new and can trace its history back to the development of computers after the Second World War, with the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 bringing together researchers from multiple fields to explore “thinking machines”. This is widely considered the start of AI as a distinct field of study and where the term “Artificial Intelligence” was used for the first time by the visionaries at that conference.
But it was not until the turn of the century that AI really came to the public’s attention, when the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997, with artificial intelligence algorithms developed by IBM engineers. A few years later, in 2011, the IBM Watson computer won the US gameshow Jeopardy, after being trained on a huge data set. These events showed the world for the very first time that computers powered with large amounts of data and artificial intelligence software – albeit very powerful computers out of reach of the general public - were capable of outperforming humans at very complex tasks.
Over the past decade, several companies have taken this a step further and developed AI systems that have achieved incredible results and performed tasks not possible by humans, due to the huge scale and complexity of the challenge. AlphaFold from Google Deepmind is one example. The programme uses AI to predict the 3D structure of nearly every protein in the human body. This improves our understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s and can massively accelerate research into medicines, vaccines and drugs. Healthcare is therefore one of the most important and useful applications of AI.
In 2018 a painting called “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy” was sold at Christie’s auction house in New York for a staggering $432,500 (USD). It was generated with artificial intelligence after being trained on many images of portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries and was the first piece of AI art sold at auction. The sale sparked a significant debate about the future role of humans in creative professions, such as art and digital media.
But this was only the start of a ‘boom’ in AI generated creative content. In 2023, a museum in The Hague (Netherlands) loaned the world famous, Girl with Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer to an international exhibition and temporarily replaced it in their gallery with an AI inspired version entitled Girl with Glowing Earrings, with many visitors to the gallery believing it was a real painting. In April 2023 the German artist Boris Eldagsen won the 2023 Sony World Photography Award with an image entitled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, before refusing the prize after revealing it was created by AI. (Pseudomnesia is Latin for fake memory!)
These images show how far AI creative technology has advanced in only a few short years, from an ability to generate low-quality AI portraits in 2018, to high-quality AI paintings and photorealistic AI images today. Both the Girl with Pearl Earring and Pseudomnesia images were created with AI software that is now available to everyone online and is partly why AI has taken off with the public in 2023, enabling any of us to become potential artists.
But paintings and photography are not the only form of art that has been shaped by AI. In 2023 the Grammys announced that music created with AI would be eligible for awards and Paul McCartney announced he had used AI to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo tape. In late 2023, this track was released as the final Beatles Song Now and Then 1 which drew considerable public attention to AI across all generations. Canadian singer Grimes has also invited anyone to create new songs with an AI copy of her voice, offering to split the royalties equally on any AI track that is commercially successful.
This report aims to answer those questions, by providing a general introduction to Artificial Intelligence technology, its business applications and its relevance to Travel & Tourism.
BRIEF HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
AI has gained significant attention in recent years – and especially in 2023 – but AI is not new and can trace its history back to the development of computers after the Second World War, with the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 bringing together researchers from multiple fields to explore “thinking machines”. This is widely considered the start of AI as a distinct field of study and where the term “Artificial Intelligence” was used for the first time by the visionaries at that conference.
But it was not until the turn of the century that AI really came to the public’s attention, when the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997, with artificial intelligence algorithms developed by IBM engineers. A few years later, in 2011, the IBM Watson computer won the US gameshow Jeopardy, after being trained on a huge data set. These events showed the world for the very first time that computers powered with large amounts of data and artificial intelligence software – albeit very powerful computers out of reach of the general public - were capable of outperforming humans at very complex tasks.
Over the past decade, several companies have taken this a step further and developed AI systems that have achieved incredible results and performed tasks not possible by humans, due to the huge scale and complexity of the challenge. AlphaFold from Google Deepmind is one example. The programme uses AI to predict the 3D structure of nearly every protein in the human body. This improves our understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s and can massively accelerate research into medicines, vaccines and drugs. Healthcare is therefore one of the most important and useful applications of AI.
In 2018 a painting called “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy” was sold at Christie’s auction house in New York for a staggering $432,500 (USD). It was generated with artificial intelligence after being trained on many images of portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries and was the first piece of AI art sold at auction. The sale sparked a significant debate about the future role of humans in creative professions, such as art and digital media.
But this was only the start of a ‘boom’ in AI generated creative content. In 2023, a museum in The Hague (Netherlands) loaned the world famous, Girl with Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer to an international exhibition and temporarily replaced it in their gallery with an AI inspired version entitled Girl with Glowing Earrings, with many visitors to the gallery believing it was a real painting. In April 2023 the German artist Boris Eldagsen won the 2023 Sony World Photography Award with an image entitled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, before refusing the prize after revealing it was created by AI. (Pseudomnesia is Latin for fake memory!)
These images show how far AI creative technology has advanced in only a few short years, from an ability to generate low-quality AI portraits in 2018, to high-quality AI paintings and photorealistic AI images today. Both the Girl with Pearl Earring and Pseudomnesia images were created with AI software that is now available to everyone online and is partly why AI has taken off with the public in 2023, enabling any of us to become potential artists.
But paintings and photography are not the only form of art that has been shaped by AI. In 2023 the Grammys announced that music created with AI would be eligible for awards and Paul McCartney announced he had used AI to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo tape. In late 2023, this track was released as the final Beatles Song Now and Then 1 which drew considerable public attention to AI across all generations. Canadian singer Grimes has also invited anyone to create new songs with an AI copy of her voice, offering to split the royalties equally on any AI track that is commercially successful.
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