Mount Shasta hikers got lost after planning trips with AI chatbots, Mother Jones reports

Mother Jones reported Nov. 1 that outdoors officials are seeing visitors rely on AI chatbots to plan backcountry trips. It describes three 20-year-olds who planned a Mount Shasta climb with Google’s Gemini, packed too little food, overestimated their fitness, reached the summit at 7:30 p.m. and got lost descending in the dark. Nick Meyers, a U.S. Forest Service program manager at the Mount Shasta Wilderness Climbing and Avalanche Center, said of such visitors: “I think they kind of turned their brains off.” The article also describes a 16-year-old rescued in British Columbia after planning with Anthropic’s Claude, though he also used Google Maps and AllTrails.