Several Canadian airports say fake, AI-generated articles online about travel information are leading to some people believing their flights have changed or been cancelled altogether.
"Bot authors" are publishing "upward of 100 articles a day with false figures, no attempted verification and misleading context that implies system-wide cascades," Erica Vella, spokesperson for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, told CBC Friday.
The articles talk about things like technology outages and "cascading delays" at airports nationwide when that was not happening, added Sean Davidson, spokesperson for Toronto's Pearson.
Pearson has reached out to several of the identified websites, said Davidson, but had not heard back from any of them as of Friday.
Vancouver Airport's Stephen Smart said in a recent meeting with his airport counterparts in Ottawa that Pearson officials brought up clickbait sites that spread fake news. "It occurred to me, actually, I've seen a few of those," he told Global News.
Five sites, including TheTraveler.org, Toronto Digest, Travel and Tour World, NomadLawyer and Travel Tourister were called out by Porter in particular. Two of the sites responded to CTV about the story, one saying they are currently training their AI models and include disclaimers.
Travel and Tour World said it “firmly denies the allegations that our website relies on automated AI bots to generate flight status or operational content for Toronto Pearson Airport.”
“We are deeply committed to factual reporting ... We take journalistic accountability seriously and are fully prepared to share our archived, timestamped data logs to clarify any specific operational discrepancies.”
The sites are becoming prolific, said Smart, and it's worse for U.S. airports.
"We're in the business of ensuring that passengers, they have the information that they need. If this was accurate information, positive or negative, no problem, we want people to have that accurate information. But what we're seeing here is either information lacking important context, or just complete, outright wrong information that's getting out to travelers."
Generally, all three said travellers should either rely on direct information from airports or airlines or reach out to their travel agent for confirmation.
