Gyeongbokgung Palace, the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini where a culture-minded foreign visitor should go during three days in Seoul, and these are the places all three recommend. The answers that generative artificial intelligence produces when travelers plan an itinerary shape a region's first impression.
Looking back on a trip through Britain to the settings of famous literary works, the most memorable places were not on any AI's list of recommendations. The Brontë Parsonage in the small northern town of Haworth is where Emily Brontë, author of "Wuthering Heights," lived. In the room that served as both living and dining room sat a portable writing desk roughly the size of a sheet of A4 paper. Only then did it make sense that Brontë wrote while baking bread. The garden hut that Virginia Woolf, a leading figure of British modernist literature, built while living at Monk's House in Sussex was likewise barely wide enough to hold a single desk. Even in modern Britain, it seemed, writing by women was a long struggle waged on cultural ground.
Seoul has places like these. Dilkusha, one of the branch sites operated by the Seoul Museum of History, is a house built in 1923 by Albert Taylor, an American, and his wife Mary Taylor, a British actress. The husband, as the Associated Press correspondent in Seoul, told the world about the March 1 Independence Movement. The wife painted Mount Kumgang, and her posthumous memoir, "Chain of Amber," also came out of that house. The Baek In-je House in Bukchon is an elegant modern hanok. These are places that show visitors a side of Seoul that is hard to find through AI recommendations alone.
To properly convey Seoul's appeal in the AI era, the city needs "cultural prompts" that connect travelers' interests with its attractions. Questions that lead people to Seoul's lesser-known sites — "I want to spend a day visiting the studios of Korean painters and literary museums," "I want to see how people lived in 20th-century Seoul," "Recommend museums along with neighborhood markets and old shops" — should be published in multiple languages so they are easy to use from abroad. Museums and galleries are best placed to do this work, because they hold the collections and research materials that such questions are made of.
AI also needs better access to information about Seoul. AI cannot roam the entire internet, and information locked inside images and attached files is not searchable. Many sites block bots, and some contract with only one AI company. How many of Seoul's cultural institutions have checked whether their own websites are reachable by chatbots? The Seoul History Archive has made more than 26,000 items public, including records, photographs and maps. It is a valuable asset, but making material public is not the same as making it reach people. Places, people and dates have to be linked before AI can learn from them and recommend them to users.
On that trip through Britain, AI could point the way to the homes of Brontë and Woolf, but it could not bring anyone to the desk itself. That part is up to the traveler. The same is true of a trip to Seoul. Making it possible to experience the Seoul that AI cannot find — that is work museums and galleries can do.
