Sweaters, pumpkin spice, colorful hikes, apple cider donuts, cute towns, that crisp feeling in the air after a sweltering summer. Who doesn’t love fall? As an Australian — who now calls autumn “fall” — I now get why the change of season is such a big deal, especially in New York City.
While I normally stumble upon an Instagram post or rely on my friends to tell me about the cool fall towns we should visit on a group trip, this year I thought I’d also try AI.
With ChatGPT’s new AI Agent mode, it could even run a search for me while I’m watching You’ve Got Mail (my favorite fall movie to kick off the season, like every other millennial woman in New York).
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I actually live just outside of the city, so my location is perfect for day trips, hikes, events and eateries, both in Manhattan and in the many towns within an hour’s drive.
We’re on a budget this fall because we’ve been going through IVF this year (and using AI to help that process), so I skewed our activities to be free or cheap. That shouldn’t be hard, given that I wait all year for an ube latte at our favorite coffee shop. It tastes like fall.
Now, over to ChatGPT.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
AI agents can find your fall adventures
Make sure you spend a little bit of extra time on your first prompt, as the AI agent can search for up to 10 minutes once you submit it. You don’t want to have to interrupt it or start over too many times. I pondered over things like the type of fall fun I was looking for, our budget, our schedule and access to a car.
This is how I prompted the AI agent: “I live in Montclair, NJ. My wife and I are planning out our fall and we’d like a list of activities, attractions and destinations that we can visit. We’re on a budget, so aim for affordable or free. Find options that we might not already know about.
For example, best easy hikes to see the fall leaves, cute towns within an hour’s drive, restaurants and coffee shops perfect in the fall, upcoming events etc. We can also come into Manhattan. We’d like to do something every second week, so present four experiences over the next two months.”
I love how I can watch it search the web in real-time.
Keep an eye on the links that it searches, though. I’ve never heard of newyorkwelcome.net, which was a site it scanned. It would be better off using a well-known resource like TimeOut (which has a fall activities article I found with a quick Google scan of my own).
Here’s what it came back with:
- A jazz festival in my town.
- A day trip to an adorable town.
- A hike about 20 minutes away.
- Watching the New York Marathon.
This is what one of those suggestions looked like, fully planned out by the ChatGPT agent:
While I liked most of the options, the New York-based ideas weren’t exactly fall-inspired, so I asked the agent to look for another event or experience specific to the season.
The AI agent search takes much longer than the usual chatbot search, so keep this in mind. It does it automatically in the background, so you can do other things while the agent is running.
The second prompt took longer than the first, which is why it’s critical to give as much context as you can upfront.
It ended up giving me a couple of lesser-known ideas that I liked:
I asked the ChatGPT agent if it could look at popular NYC fall TikTok videos for more “secret” ideas. It said it couldn’t browse TikTok — but it did come back with “hidden spots that often go viral on social media.”
Those results were way more of what I was looking for:
While I’m not going to outsource all my fall research to AI, it’s super handy to have an agent searching for the coolest, creepiest experiences that I might not find.
As with most AI answers, just cherry-pick your favorite aspects and disregard the rest.
Try it out yourself. It’s a fun hack, especially if you need ideas on a budget for your family this fall.
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