Abstract
Sitting at the intersection between social and computer sciences, human-computer interaction research focuses on understanding human behavior in relation to computer systems (Olson & Olson, 2002). Having seen many developments over the years, human-computer interaction has been a focal point in sector-specific research, including in tourism management (Stankov & Gretzel, 2020; Tung & Law, 2020). Recently, attention has been given to human-artificial intelligence interaction in particular. For instance, Lu et al.'s (2019) Service Robot Integration Willingness Scale and Gursoy et al.'s (2019) Artificially Intelligent (AI) Device Use Acceptance model explore guests' willingness to accept different types of AI in tourism contexts, while Fu et al. (2022) have put forward the Robot Usage Resistance model to explain tourism employees' reasons for resisting the use of robots.
Most recently, user interfaces based on large language models have rapidly grown in popularity (Shanahan et al., 2023). Language model based consumer products, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, offer tourism companies new ways of working (Tuomi, 2023). For instance, Expedia recently launched language model based trip-planning tools (Biesiada, 2023), InterContinental Hotels Group is building a similar tool to improve booking experience (IHG, 2024), while Air Canada made headlines when their language model offered tourists discounts that did not exist (Garcia, 2024). Importantly, the potential for so called ‘generative artificial intelligence’ goes beyond major tourism corporations or tourist-artificial intelligence interaction. New tools facilitate the construction and sharing of Custom Assistants – customized versions of popular large language models – at a click of a few buttons, providing new affordances for tourism businesses and other stakeholders by facilitating new types of human-computer interaction in tourism, including tourist-artificial intelligence, employee-artificial intelligence, business-artificial intelligence and policymaker-artificial intelligence.