“Over the last two decades, there’s been a phenomenal push in the media to get more people outdoors, and consequently we have more people outdoors and recreating,” said Jim Moss, a Colorado-based recreation attorney and search and rescue volunteer. It’s still unclear how questionable advice from a robot will influence all those people, he added.
Turning to an AI chatbot for guidance does come with unique risks. Chatbots can “hallucinate” persuasively presenting misinformation as real, and their use can lead to a phenomenon called “cognitive surrender,” said Chris Flathmann, a human-centered computing professor at Clemson University in South Carolina who has studied AI and search and rescue.
“When humans work with AI systems, they can get so deep into it they give up thinking critically for themselves,” he explained. When AI pretends to be an expert on an unfamiliar topic, “you can’t call BS on that because you don’t have the expertise.” And once you stop thinking critically, it can be hard to start again, especially in a stressful backcountry situation.
Chatbots also tend to tell users what they want to hear and to do so with authority regardless of whether the sources they’re consulting are reliable, Flathmann and others said. Claude or ChatGPT might answer a query with extensive directions and advice that sound credible but are actually scraped from Reddit threads and out-of-date YouTube videos—and might even be entirely fabricated.
TikTok and Instagram may offer a viewer inspiration, but AI tends to offer instructions—right or wrong—as well as encouragement, Flathmann said. “AI isn’t trying to trick people into going up mountains, but I think it’s the natural evolution of what happens when you get a tool like this.”
Regardless of the resources recreators use, experts have the same advice: When you’re headed to a new place, make sure you double-check your information against reliable, authoritative sources like up-to-date public-land agency maps and websites, trail association websites, or guidebooks. Even better, talk to a real-live guide, a national forest official, or a park ranger.
“If you’re going to go into places that will kill you,” Meyers said, “you should take your planning seriously.”