Warning issued after tourists keep turning up at landmark that doesn't exist
For the discerning holidaymaker taking a trip to Tasmania looking for a 'peaceful escape' and an 'authentic connection to nature', you should check out the Weldborough Hot Springs, as advertised on the website of Tasmania Tours.
They said it was a 'secluded forest retreat' and featured in an article hawking out the '7 Best Hot Springs Tasmania Experiences for 2026'.
Only there's a slight problem with all of this, it's complete bulls**t.
There is no such place as Weldborough Hot Springs, so it cannot be any of the things it was described as being in the since-deleted Tasmania Tours article, which had been AI-generated and posted online in July 2025.
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Unfortunately, some people were taken in by the artificial claims and showed up in the real Tasmanian town of Weldborough to ask where they should go to find the hot springs, but since there are no hot springs around Weldborough, it resulted in confused locals and very disappointed tourists.
According to ABC, local pub owner Kristy Probert has been dealing with people showing up asking where to find the hot springs and getting calls from people who wanted to book a place to stay has become a daily problem.
She said: "I actually had a group of 24 drivers turn up there two days ago that were on a trip from the mainland, and they'd actually taken a detour to come to the hot springs."
They all ended up very disappointed as she had to explain to them the nearby water source was actually the Weld River, which is 'freezing cold' and 'definitely not a hot spring'.
She explained that tourists were 'more likely to find a sapphire' than a hot spring, and told people who show up if they manage to find these hot springs they could come back to her pub and she'd 'shout you beers all night'.
Since they don't exist, nobody's been able to return for the free beers.
Tasmania Tours is operated by Australian Tours and Cruises, and their boss Scott Hennessy told ABC: "Our AI has messed up completely."
He said they'd outsourced their marketing material to a third party, which used some AI-generated content, and while blog posts were typically reviewed before posting, there were some which went public in error while he was not in the country.
He also claimed his company had to use AI to keep up as they 'don't have enough horsepower to write enough content on our own' and needed to compete for search results with customers, insisting they were a genuine website selling actual tours and not a hoax.
This is not the first time artificial intelligence has spewed up fake tourist destinations which have resulted in actual people trying to visit them.
Euronews reports that a couple asked ChatGPT to plan them a romantic Japanese mountain hike, but gave them the wrong operating hours for the ropeway to get down and they were left stranded in the dark as a result of trusting AI to get the details right.
According to the BBC, two tourists in Peru spent $160 trying to visit the 'Sacred Canyon of Humantay' and were planning a mountain hike to the place, but there was no such place.
AI had made the whole thing up, and these two people were planning on going hiking through the mountains without a guide to look for it, which would have been incredibly dangerous.
Meanwhile, FastCompany warned about a couple travelling in Malaysia who went to a cable car attraction they'd seen on TikTok, but it turned out the video they'd watched had been generated by AI and there wasn't any cable car to visit.
It's yet another aspect of life that the perfidious falsehoods cooked up by AI is spoiling for people as they're spending time and money looking for that which does not exist.
LADbible Group has contacted Australian Tours and Cruises for further comment.
Topics: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Travel, Australia
Joe Harker