How A.I. Tools Helped the Travel Team Study Its ‘Places to Go’ Lists

We used several A.I. search engines, including Gemini, a large language model that can handle files of up to 750,000 words, and Semantra, an open-source “semantic search engine” that Mr. Freedman developed. Instead of searching for specific terms — “sustainability,” say, or “climate change” — it searches for concepts or themes. “It’s a new paradigm of search, not looking at keywords but trying to capture meaning,” Mr. Freedman said.

The Times has specific policies around the use of A.I., and nothing that comes straight from an A.I. program can appear in our articles, in part because of the possibility of hallucinations — more or less the program just making things up. So after running our queries through those search engines, Mr. Seward and Mr. Freedman turned the results over to Ms. Mzezewa. From her perspective, the technology was most helpful in identifying interesting nuggets within that mountain of text, like the effect of world events on the list, seen in the 2009 inclusion of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan (we called it a “fragile city on the way to recovery”).

She found Semantra especially helpful “because it was giving more context over time,” she said, and let her see how we’d written about topics like overtourism and the rise of social media in travel, even if we hadn’t used those exact words.

For example, we’d asked the A.I. programs to identify instances when we’d written about sustainable travel. That term didn’t really exist when the list was started, but the concept of more environmentally friendly travel did. Among the examples the search engine turned up was Star Island in the Bahamas, which first made our list as the “eco-destination of the year” in 2009.

When we humans first started looking at the years of lists, certain themes had jumped out: The impact of smartphones and social media, the growing focus on climate change and the possible negative effect of travel, including overcrowding. The A.I. programs’ analysis pretty much mirrored our own, providing a kind of high-tech backstop to our journalist’s intuition.

Picking our list each year is a team effort that requires knowledge of trends in travel, an eye for great visuals and a sense of what people are looking for now on their journeys — to name just a few of the skills brought to bear. Artificial intelligence won’t be picking our Places to Go anytime soon, but it can help us understand where we’ve been.