Ever since I had a discussion with James on the Churn and Burn podcast on the subject, I’ve been meaning to flesh my thoughts on this topic into a full blog post.

I’ll preface this with the context that I’m probably in the minority in the community with my thoughts on AI in general, so take this with a grain of salt.

I know how helpful it is for those of you in technical fields, and I begrudgingly use it at work and my MS admin tasks. Maybe I’d be more into it if living in an AI technocracy wasn’t so damn boring. 

Those of you that are on top of your 19th century English history already knew this, but the term luddite means something outside of a reference to Ted Kaczynski (I’ll be honest, I didn’t know this until I opened Wikipedia this morning). 

The Luddites were members of a movement of textile workers who were protesting how automated machinery affected their pay, working conditions, and apparently, child labor. Sound somewhat familiar? Now, it’s just a vaguely derogatory way to call someone slow to adopt  tech.

I’m not a (modern usage) Luddite – I’m writing this on a laptop and can see at least 5 loop-running devices in my FoV. But I think anyone that is wary of AI’s integration into the hobby has valid reason for concern. 

There’s the obvious one – banks using it to be more agile in averse action. But there’s some less obvious factors that will, in my opinion, cause further degradation of the hobby. 

Bank usage

Most of the chatter around the effects of AI on churning center on this, for good reason. Banks are notoriously slow moving and the ability to “turn raw data into actionable insights” allows the doers to convince the higher ups to make changes quicker. 

As I said in the podcast, I’m a little skeptical that this is really that large of a change. While LLMs have allowed computers to go beyond just providing you with data to interpret yourself, did the banks really need AI to identify the behavior that resulted in some of the shutdowns we’ve seen lately? 

Last I checked, SQL has been around for over 50 years. A simple database query for “show me all cardholders who are spending a small country’s GDP each month on dining out between 6pm and 6am every weekend” would return the same information. 

That being said, I still have concerns. The first is that big banks have always had the resources necessary to sniff out unprofitable behavior, but small banks and credit unions may not. When one team is wearing a lot of hats and overworked, having the ability to have Claude do it while they handle something else is worrisome. 

The second is that as all of us who work at a megacorp can attest, nothing gets the C-Suite weak in the knees quite like AI adoption. The red tape that stops smart analysts from curtailing our fun no longer exists if you say Copilot told you to do it. 

Scraping

Another concern, especially in private groups, is using AI to scrape the entire conversation into a searchable database. I understand why this is appealing, because there’s so much to keep up with. Acronyms, everchanging data points, and particularly busy news days make for a lot to sift through. 

But there’s an inherent trust, especially in those smaller groups, that what you’re sharing in there is only for the community. The paranoia that everything is being scraped into a LLM (because in many cases, it is) has killed off a lot of novel sharing. 

I don’t really have an answer to this one since there isn’t a way to stop it – the closest surrogate feels like building a shared understanding that it’s to the detriment of everyone to do this kind of scraping. 

And all of that is before you consider that there is so much nuance to a lot of the things shared in private groups. When I use ChatGPT to make sure that I’m not ever too explicit about something in a public blog post, it often gets things comically incorrect. It’s scary to think about how a well-intentioned beginner could get into a really tough spot because AI incorrectly interpreted some high-stakes data points. 

Probing

I’m probably going to come across as an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn with this one, apologies in advance. But does anyone else feel like using Deep Research for set and forget probing kind of killed the fun of it?

Figuring out the lay of the land across Flyertalk, /r/churning and private groups used to be how you built up the institutional knowledge to navigate the inevitable pitfalls of the game. Nowadays, you can just enter a prompt to get a bulleted list of exactly how to run any loop that has managed to enter the public lexicon.

AI has really supercharged the ongoing public vs. private conversation in the community because blogs and podcasts are public material for LLMs to learn from. It doesn’t matter how small your reach is if it ends up somewhere that it can easily be queried. 

Before I became so jaded towards AI, I was using it quite a bit for probing. But I felt like I ended up on a fruitless wild goose chase way too often. Sometimes, you gotta roll up your sleeves and open up ‘ol reliable to track down your next play.

Redemptions

This last one isn’t as consequential as the others, but still feels like it’s worth calling out. I think we all know we’ve jumped the shark on award travel entering the public eye. Everybody knows about the Platinum and CSR and wants to talk to you about how to get a family of 8 to Italy in J in July on 2 month’s notice. 

I don’t think AI is going to change that situation all that much because there’s a litany of tools out there making award travel more accessible than ever that were developed the old fashioned way. I’m not throwing shade, I use them too, it’s more of an acknowledgement that the days of slogging through Expert Flyer to find availability are long gone.

Where I do think AI will have an effect is the more random side of redemptions. Every blog on the face of the earth talks about booking ANA J – there’s no secret to be kept. But very few talk about things like using Wyndham points to go see Phish at the Garden or Hilton to watch F1 in Monza’s Paddock Club. 

In the past, there was very little incentive for developers in the points space to spend bandwidth creating tools for more niche things like that when they could be improving their flight and hotel search tools instead. 

But when everybody is a developer, it will never be too long until Claude’s favorite color palette is skinned over API calls to every possible redemption program you can think of. Again, I understand why, and everything doesn’t exist to be gatekept. But this does mean that the bargains are going to be harder to come by. 

All in all, I’m probably not beating the luddite accusations based off of this post. But in my opinion, there’s so many inherently human elements to this game. Outsourcing it all to AI is going to both lead you to inaccurate answers and leave you extremely bored. Use it a little less to find a credit union, and a little more to build a nice vibe coded tracking app. That’s what it’s for, right?

Pictured: the kind of bargain that is now surfaced thanks to AI – who wants to double the bid to a whopping 2 Avios to go belt Bring me to Life and My Immortal like it’s 2003 again?

ಚೀರ್ಸ್!