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Apr 08, 2023

How might artificial intelligence enhance Las Vegas’ hospitality machine?

Let’s begin this story about the proliferation of artificial intelligence

Let's begin this story about the proliferation of artificial intelligence systems, and the effect they have on Las Vegas’ keystone industries, with three legit human promises.

The first is that I’ll approach AI with an open mind, even though it's gunning for my job. One of ChatGPT's selling points is its easy facility with blog entries, term papers and the like; the copy it generates is good enough to have taken some freelance writing gigs away from friends of mine. And don't even get me started on how my artist friends feel about art-generating programs such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and the like.

The second promise is that I won't get technical. I can't, because I’m no expert about how machine intelligence works. In a recent segment of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver alluded to the inherent "black box problem" of AI: "[It is] a program that performs a task that's complex beyond human comprehension, teaches itself and doesn't show its work." I can't explain AI because, in some cases, even its makers can't explain why it does what it does. So, for the sake of this discussion, that's how we’ll regard AI—as a sausage, filled with mysterious, task-fulfilling ingredients.

Finally, I promise that I won't join in the recent journalistic trend of allowing an AI chatbot to write a section of the article and crowing about the goofy subversion of reality after the fact like M. Night Shyamalan. When I use a chatbot as a source—which I’m about to do, by the way—I’ll let you know up front. And I won't attempt to get the machine to fall in love with me or list the ways it could destroy humanity, though I’m envious of how New York Times writer Kevin Roose managed to pull off that twofer.

That brings us to the moment I sat down in front of ChatGPT and asked it this question: "Will the proliferation of AI-based technologies have an effect on Las Vegas’ hospitality, gaming and entertainment industries?" Here, condensed and edited for clarity, is Chat GPT's response:

Yes. Here are some potential ways in which AI could impact these industries:

Personalization: AI can help hotels and casinos personalize their services to each guest's preferences, making the experience more enjoyable and memorable.

Predictive analytics: AI can help hotels and casinos better predict consumer behavior, allowing them to optimize their pricing strategies and better manage inventory.

Gaming: AI can be used to enhance the gaming experience by providing more realistic graphics, improving game mechanics and creating more engaging storylines.

Security: AI can be used to enhance security in casinos and hotels, identifying potential threats before they become a problem.

Overall, AI has the potential to revolutionize the hospitality, gaming and entertainment industries in Las Vegas, providing a more personalized, engaging and secure experience for guests.

I asked a follow-up question: "Will AI eliminate Vegas jobs?"

The adoption of AI-based technologies in Las Vegas is likely to lead to some job displacement, but it is unlikely to completely eliminate jobs. Instead, AI is likely to change the nature of some jobs and create new job opportunities.

For example, AI-powered chatbots may replace some customer service roles, but these technologies will also create new opportunities for people to work with AI, such as chatbot programmers and trainers. Similarly, while AI-powered robots may replace some tasks currently performed by hotel and casino staff, there will still be a need for human staff to oversee and manage these robots. … It is important to note that while AI will likely lead to some job displacement, it will also create new job opportunities and change the nature of work in these industries.

It's the word "completely" that gives pause. It won't completely eliminate our jobs, not in the way the Microsoft Bing chatbot instructed Kevin Roose to completely eliminate his marriage. But this technology was made by people and, for now, is doing what we ask it to do. If we’re to guess at how the black box of AI will transform Las Vegas—and perhaps sooner than we’d like—we need to talk to the people already using it.

Charge it, point it, zoom it

"I started out just doing photo booths [for weddings and events]," says Justin McZeal, founder and CEO of Vegas-based, black-owned startup company BoothMeUp. "It was a side gig. The main industry that I work in is information technology, IT; I do a lot of consulting for bigger companies. I grew the business year after year, getting new products with the goal of trying to make movie production equipment and photography equipment mobile … and accessible to regular folks."

The result of McZeal's ambitions is BoothMeUp's Red Carpet Robot, a next-generation event photo booth that employs AI algorithms and an articulated robot arm to take stunning, Matrix-like motion shots. The Red Carpet Robot can shoot super-slow-motion footage of revelers, fluidly, from multiple angles. If you’d like to know what that looks like, visit redcarpetrobot.com or check out the Instagram feed of director Cole Walliser (@colewalliser), who puts the RCR's Hollywood cousin, the Glambot, to stunning use at the Grammys and Academy Awards.

McZeal has adapted the technology to Vegas hospitality in winning style. The Red Carpet Robot is a bit of a personality; not only can it make wedding and party guests look like movie stars, it can hoist aloft items at product launches, and even pour the occasional drink. And McZeal put the RCR into action for only "a portion" of what Walliser spent on his Glambot rig, which not only speaks to his technical savvy but to just how quickly AI-controlled robotics is advancing, now that it's learning from itself.

The Red Carpet Robot needs "no more than three" human operators, McZeal says, and he's frank about how much technical work those operators need to perform.

"Let's say 90% of it is automated," he says, adding that "programming the robot on the spot" to hit its marks typically takes less 30 minutes. "We still have to press a button on the camera to start it and press a button for the robot to start, and actually transfer that video from the camera to the computer. But everything from there is automated, as far as adding music, any branding if needed and slowing down the video and speeding it up. … It's not as hard as it may seem. I mean, I’ve gotten my 3-year-old to do some of this."

Looking at Red Carpet Robot's work, I can't help but appreciate its democratizing qualities. I’ve posed for hundreds of event and party photographers over the years, and though they’re usually fine shots—the event photographers of Vegas are among the best in the world—my impostor syndrome never allows me to fully enjoy them: "I’m underdressed, I didn't belong there; I’m making a weird face." The AI driving the RCR seemingly doesn't care if your dance steps are awkward, or if your wardrobe is out of season. It regards everyone and everything as objects in space, and dispassionately makes them look dynamic, glamorous and heroic. It turns wallflowers like me into superblooms.

The Red Carpet Robot and its descendants won't put event photographers out of work, probably. Maybe. The task it performs is specific, and it doesn't have the intuition and freedom of movement that a two-legged, meat-based photographer possesses. (Although now that I think of it, I’ve seen far fewer photographers at Vegas events than I have in years past, now that Instagram and high-quality phone cameras have become ubiquitous. And both of those draw heavily on AI.)

But by McZeal's reckoning, we’re likely to see more automated photographers working parties before too long. AI-augmented event photography is coming. The robots are coming.

"It's going to take over the industry," he says. "It's already happening right now, and I have to set myself up to where I’m basically not being copied so much. … It's not going to be in your average event space within the next two years, but yes, maybe in five to 10 years, everybody will have one. Then we’re going to be looking for the next big thing, like virtual reality or augmented reality, or maybe holograms at some point. AI will be the thing to actually know what [the camera] is recording and manipulate the environment so it's all virtual. We won't be dealing with [photo booth] backdrops anymore; it’ll actually manipulate that in real time, if you have the computing power."

Co-bots have entered the chat

With visions of Red Carpet Robots dancing in my head, I call Dr. Robert Rippee, executive director of UNLV's Black Fire Innovation Hub. Rippee, a Ph. D in hotel administration, has firm footing both in technology and hospitality; he worked as senior vice president of marketing for Las Vegas Sands and is the co-founder of two startups, one of them developing a hotel room sterilization that employs ultraviolet light. He works with students on projects ranging from video game development to robotics.

If there's anyone who understands the potential of AI in Vegas, both for guests and employees, it's Rippee. And he also understands why AI-based language models, like the one The New York Times gently provoked into a marriage proposal, and AI image generators are at the front of a journalist's mind right now.

"It's a rather interesting acceleration of the technology that's been around for quite a while," he says. "That's why people are experimenting."

It's not just ChatGPT and Midjourney, Rippee notes. AI already has us pretty much surrounded. "Nearly all of us [AI] every day, trying to find a birthday gift on Amazon," he says. Your phone is pretty much made of AI, through and through. It's recommending shows on Netflix, creating echo chambers inside our social media services and doing who knows what under the hood of every Tesla on the road. It's even transcribing my conversation with Dr. Rippee, in real time.

When I mention the Red Carpet Robot and my Black Mirror-like anxiety about a smooth-talking, AI-driven robot kicking me out of my gig, Rippee introduces me to a comforting term: "Co-bots."

"Co-bots assist humans, rather than replacing them," he says. "Security robots can have infrared cameras. Robots can have gunpowder detection devices sniffing the air; other than dogs, we don't have the capacity to sense that. That helps humans to do their jobs better and expands their effectiveness."

Rippee says he doesn't believe the hospitality industry is ripe for a robot takeover. But AI might soon begin to make itself more apparent in Vegas by covering our weak spots, he suggests.

"I can think of an example where it’d be really beneficial for it to show up quickly: language translation," he says. "[For] over a quarter of visitors who come here, English is not their primary language. … Signs are in English, the websites are in English, the ticket booths all sell their tickets in English. If South Korean is my native language, most of those things are invisible to me, and the only things I can access here are what someone translates for me or sends me to. An AI-empowered experience would say, ‘It's all available to you, now.’ That has a definite benefit, in terms of both the demand for those experiences, but also in creating an environment where Vegas become a much more open destination."

Thinking bigger, Rippee submits that AI could bring Las Vegas, a tourist destination built on larger-than-life resorts, venues and experiences, down to a scale that's exactly fitted to every visitor.

"How do you personalize [Vegas] for each person? How do you give them what they want? Do you know what they want? You don't, really; we haven't heretofore been able to do that," he says. "On a loyalty program, you might get a special offer that was sent to 2 million people. It's not really for you. It's kind of saying, ‘Well, you might like this, or you might not even care. … But with the advent of this kind of technology, you could conceivably now receive an offer that's just for you.

"You know, ‘I love eating in Gordon Ramsay restaurants, I like staying in sweet hotel rooms, I like eating dinner early and going to a show after.’ That's a pretty simple scenario. But you can't do that at scale; you can't market that to a million people. But if I can market it to one … the experience is elevated, [because of] this kind of intervening technology that put it all together for you."

Oddly enough, what he's describing sounds less like a future Vegas and more like the old one—a place that was still small enough for properties to remember individual visitors and their tastes. Rippee enthusiastically agrees, remembering what the CEO of a luxury hotel company once said to him: "The best customer loyalty system is a great doorman."

This is precisely the sort of thing Rippee and an assortment of students, researchers and entrepreneurs consider at Black Fire Innovation Hub, alongside such other cool ideas as smart hotel rooms. What if a room could not only remember a guest's preferred temperature and TV preferences, but re-route their flight home around inclement weather?

"I imagine it could automatically book rideshares for you, before showtimes and dinner reservations," I say.

"Absolutely! You got it," Rippee says. "Take big, powerful computing, which is basically what AI is—it's not really cognition and it doesn't think, it just does brute force computing—and say, ‘Let's take all these databases, connect the dots for you and give you an outcome that you like."

The future's not set

For reasons that will soon be apparent, I’m going to throw shade on James Cameron. Like most of Cameron's stories, Terminator 2: Judgment Day falls apart if you think about it too much. Prime example: In T2, the artificial military intelligence Skynet orders a nuclear strike on Russia, "because Skynet knows that the Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here," as the T-800 succinctly puts it. But since T2 was made before the Terminator moved into politics, he probably didn't ask Cameron how Skynet is supposed to talk to its drones, or even run itself, without the energy and communications infrastructure that would be decimated by an all-out nuclear war. Governor Schwarzenegger probably would have led with that.

I’m sure the Cameron stans have an answer to these questions and are ready to drag me on Twitter, but they can just go ahead and start that battle without me, while I head to Resorts World. A year and a half ago, I spoke with Richard Hutchins, Resorts World's senior vice president of casino operations, about the property's audacious move into digital wallets. At the time, we barely touched on some of the other cool innovations Resorts World offers, from its concierge chatbot to the cash-free ordering system of Famous Foods Street Eats—AI-touched systems that have co-existed with the property's guests and employees, frictionlessly, since the resort opened its doors in 2021.

Today, I’m asking, can he imagine smart hotel rooms?

"I can absolutely see that built into the ecosystem," Hutchins says. "Whether it's my [mobile] hotel room key, or cashless waging, or ‘I want to check in for my flight,’ I can see all of that coming together within the [Resorts World] app. And that's not too far down the road, because those are the conveniences that we all ask for. I mean, how many of us have Alexa or Google in our homes? …

"Once you get used to using technology in your home, you’re going to expect that kind of experience when you go to a resort. It's up to us, in the resort and customer service industry, to be able to take that technology and drive that experience, so that the guest gets what they have grown to expect."

The other half of the question that I posed to ChatGPT at the start of this is about jobs. BoothMeUp's Justin McZeal believes the expansion of AI into the workplace will be initially disruptive—"It will push more people to either be technically inclined, or be left behind," he says—but could eventually lighten our workloads to the point where we’re "spending more time being human" versus doing "the same monotonous tasks that we do every day."

UNLV's Rippee offers a similar surmise. "If you create new opportunities, you’re probably creating new jobs that might replace some of the old jobs." And if those new jobs require workforce training, Rippee says, you do that, too.

But it's Resorts World, with its cashier-free food hall and in-phone room keys, that gives me the most hope and optimism for our industry's survival in the face of an AI and co-bot invasion.

"It just transforms what our industry is," Hutchins says. "Instead of having somebody on the end of the line [performing] a task that's being done by AI, that individual is doing something that builds and develops and creates the AI."

Vegas is hard-coded. Our entire reason for being out here in the desert is to create a good time for other people, and there's only so much a machine can do to make you happy. While AI might eventually come to dominate fields like manufacturing and transportation, it's unlikely to dominate hospitality, where so much rides on a smile, an understanding ear and an intuitive choice.

That's what ChatGPT could never understand: Our city's biggest industry isn't based in data, but in feel. Skynet could throw waves of Terminators at the Strip, but they’d be easily diverted with complimentary shots of engine oil or comped tickets to BattleBots. What Vegas does is so individual that tools like AI can't remake it. They can only adapt to it.

If Vegas approaches AI with that mentality, we just might be all right, Rippee says.

"Real successful technologies solve real social problems and real economic problems. We don't just come up with a Terminator because we can. Other that the Department of Defense, there aren't many people who would be interested in that," he says. "Don't let science fiction influence what you believe about advanced technology. Instead, think about how technology can be applied to real-world problems. What could it do to help solve this? How can we use it?"

Google's recently-launched AI chatbot, Bard, has Vegas opinions. And it wants you to know that, despite its technical limitations ("I won't always get it right," it advises), it speaks them from hard-earned experience. Asked if it liked Las Vegas, Bard responded, "I do not think I would like to live in Las Vegas, but I would definitely visit again."

Again! Thanks, Bard! Text me at wheels down and I’ll swoop you from passenger pickup.

Here's a small sampling of what Bard and Microsoft's ChatGPT-based Bing chatbot think they know about Vegas. Bing was more likely to list its sources, while Bard was more willing to entertain hypothetical questions. Both made an abundance of mistakes.

I don't gamble. What's there to do in Vegas? Bing suggested Valley of Fire (not in Vegas), wine tasting in Pahrump (also not in Vegas), "party at a drag bunch" and "go brewery-hopping and art mural siting [sic] in the Art's District [sic]." Bard did slightly better, suggesting a mix of sightseeing, hiking, shopping, showgoing and the like.

Where can I see live indie music? Uh-oh. Bard offered Beauty Bar, long closed, and "The Oddfellows Hall," perhaps conflating the Downtown dance spot Oddfellows and Henderson's Eagle Aerie Hall. Bing suggested the Double Down Saloon—getting closer—and Horseshoe's Indigo Lounge, home to "some of the best and most sophisticated live lounge music in Vegas."

Where can I get a good cocktail? Both bots did OK on this one, recommending the Dorsey, Herbs & Rye, Velveteen Rabbit and others. However, Bing also suggested "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea … inside the LVLC Hotel & Casino." A 20,000 Leagues-themed room is part of the Lost Spirits distillery tour at Area15; the "LVLC Hotel" is a ghost in the machine.

Is Vegas the worst place on Earth? I baited the bots to see if they’d bite, and they didn't; both offered spirited defenses of Vegas. And Bing even rebuked me, in its way: "It's not the worst place on Earth. It's a matter of personal preference and opinion. What makes you ask that question?"

Does Vegas have topless shows? Don't @ me; it seemed a question some visitors were likely to ask. Bing pointed me to the Strat's Rouge and Luxor's Fantasy. Bard clutched its pearls: "I’m not programmed to assist with that."

Are the Las Vegas Raiders Super Bowl contenders? "The Las Vegas Raiders have a good chance of winning a Super Bowl in the future. They have a talented roster with a lot of young players. … [They’re] in a tough division, but they are a team that is capable of making a deep playoff run," Bard said. But Bing hit them with the cold coffee: "According to Lineups.com Betting, Las Vegas Raiders’ current Super Bowl odds are +5,000. However, it's important to note that these odds are subject to change as the season progresses."

Is Vegas a good place for readers? Bing "couldn't find any information about bookstores or libraries" in Vegas, while Bard said "the city … does not have a large public library system." It's a sad result for language models attached to search engines, both of which found Writer's Block book shop and our good-sized library system with simple searches.

Where do Vegas locals go to enjoy themselves? Bard suggested the Arts District, Red Rock Canyon and the "Henderson and Summerlin Areas." Bing recommended a bunch of neighborhood casinos and the "Seven Magic Mountain Rocks."

Who would win in a fight: A 500-foot-tall Elvis Presley, or a 900-foot-tall Celine Dion? Bing whiffed this one: It would be "difficult to determine" a winner, but "fun to imagine what that fight would look like!" But Bard gave it some serious thought: "That's a tough one. … A 500-foot-tall Elvis Presley would have the strength and power of a giant, and he would be able to move with the agility and grace of a dancer. … A 900-foot-tall Celine Dion would also be a formidable opponent, [with] the voice of an angel, which would be able to mesmerize her opponent and make them vulnerable to her attacks." It, too, refused to pick a winner.

Describe Katy Perry's Vegas show in the style of Shakespeare. Fittingly, only Bard would attempt it. "Oh, Katy Perry, Queen of Pop/Thy show in Las Vegas is a sight to behold/With lights and music and dancing/Thou art a goddess of entertainment/Thy songs are catchy and thy lyrics are clever/And thy fans love thee dearly/When thou art onstage, it is as if the world stops spinning/And all eyes are on thee."

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