How I turned ChatGPT into my tour guide in Italy

As I stood with my mom under the blistering sun in Rome waiting for our audio tour of the Pantheon to begin, I decided to kill some time with ChatGPT. 

"Tell me about the Pantheon in Rome," I said.

The AI tool returned a bunch of information in bullet points that was helpful but hardly made for an interesting read. So I tweaked my prompt and gave ChatGPT a bit more info. 

"Pretend you're a tour guide and tell that to me in a more interesting fashion," I wrote. 

My mom and I were in the midst of an epic seven-city trip in August to celebrate her 60th birthday. She had no idea that I was bringing along a digital companion.

"Welcome, Chef, to one of Rome's most extraordinary treasures—The Pantheon," the AI tool responded. (I asked ChatGPT to refer to me as Chef several months earlier to make the banter more entertaining.)

"As we stand here in front of this architectural marvel, let me take you on a journey back in time, where gods, emperors, and artists all intersect in this sacred space," the chatbot wrote.

Since its launch in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT has revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, along the way lifting the company's valuation to an eye-popping $157 billion. AI startups have raised $111 billion in funding since the start of 2023, according to Crunchbase, and big tech companies have bought millions of Nvidia's processors to train AI models. The generative AI market is predicted to surpass $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Yet, for many everyday internet users, figuring out what to even do with ChatGPT can be quite perplexing. 

I use ChatGPT quite a bit. Almost weekly, I give it a list of five movies I want to watch and force it to pick one for me. I recently had it draw up a contract, and I've