Ted De Jager is well acquainted with the annual spring ritual that often precedes summer camping at national and provincial parks for Canadians across the country.<\/p>\n
Every year, in early May, the Abbotsford, B.C.-based retired RCMP officer arranges what he jokingly calls a mission control-style set up. A few minutes before 7 a.m. PT, he and his wife each log into the BC Parks website, which handles campsite reservations for provincial parks, with both a computer and an iPad. <\/p>\n
One phone is also signed into the campsite booking platform \u2013 as an emergency back-up \u2013 while a second phone is running FaceTime to allow real-time co-ordination between the couple and two similar set-ups run by their longtime camping friends.<\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Hikers camp near the summit of Golden Ears mountain outside of Maple Ridge, B.C.Jesse Winter\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n The moment of truth comes some time between 6:59:59 a.m. and 7 a.m., when online campground reservations open for dates starting three months ahead on a first-come, first-served basis. Will the friends be able to reserve enough sites for their annual get-together at Manning Park in August?<\/p>\n With several devices active, the group usually manages it. But even Mr. De Jager, who\u2019s had his share of thrills in his career as a police officer and 15 years in the army before that, finds it all a bit too nerve-wracking.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a whole different kind of stress.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Mr. De Jager\u2019s stress \u2013 and his odds of getting a campsite, along with those of many other avid campers \u2013 could get worse. The reason is artificial intelligence.<\/a> <\/p>\n Tech-savvy consumers around the world are increasingly relying on AI agents to make digital reservations for anything from restaurants to shuttle services to the airport. The Globe and Mail set out to see if it could design an AI-powered bot that can make campground bookings exactly when reservations open. We did, and it was easy.<\/p>\n The success of our experiment raises the concern that users deploying AI bots will be able to snag camping spots faster than even the fastest-clicking humans on government-run campground reservation platforms, which mostly rely on first-come, first-served systems.<\/p>\n For years, frustrated campers have speculated on social media about bots snatching coveted sites at popular parks. But evidence of the issue remained scant. Several provincial park agencies and Parks Canada, which oversees national parks, have said their platforms keep bots at bay by preventing bulk reservations and requiring users to set up secure individual log-in accounts, among other tools. <\/p>\n AI promises to unleash a different kind of bot. Not the so-called scalping bots programmed to make mass reservations to resell at higher prices, but bots that use an individual\u2019s account to simply make a booking on their behalf and automate a time-consuming task.<\/p>\n This sort of bot is much harder for booking websites to detect because it mimics a human consumer\u2019s behaviour, experts say. And it poses a particular challenge for reservation systems that award spots based on user speed.<\/p>\n What to know about Ottawa\u2019s push for more data centres<\/a><\/p>\n Even before AI, the first-come, first-served model tended to favour savvier, faster, better organized people, said Nick Arnosti, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota in the department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. <\/p>\n \u201cNow, if you\u2019re writing a bot, basically you have an even bigger advantage over other people,\u201d he said. \u201cIt absolutely would make the issues of first-come, first-served, I think, even more extreme.\u201d<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a potential silver-lining. The rise of AI booking bots could accelerate efforts already afoot, in both Canada and the U.S., to find a better system to award reservations for the limited number of campsites at government-run parks \u2013 or to allocate any scarce supply of public goods, for that matter. A system that\u2019s fairer, less stressful \u2013 and where bots won\u2019t have an edge. <\/p>\n It took The Globe only a couple of hours to build a campsite-booking bot using the Claude AI model. The AI assistant, which is trained to attribute importance to factors such as fairness and rule-following, it told The Globe, initially expressed reservations about building such a tool, which it likened to a scalping-grade bot. <\/p>\n But Claude eventually agreed to complete the task as a proof-of-concept meant to aid The Globe\u2019s journalistic endeavour.<\/p>\n Experts call for \u2018mystery shopping\u2019 of AI chatbots to test if they are advising on self-harm, child bullying<\/a><\/p>\n We tested the bot on the Ontario Parks camp reservation page, which relies on a booking platform similar to the one used by BC Parks and Parks Canada. We scheduled the bot to reserve a campsite at Algonquin Provincial Park\u2019s Mew Lake campground at 7 a.m. Eastern Time on a recent July morning for reservations opening five months later in early December. <\/p>\n While competition for camping in winter is much less intense than for the summer months, the trial run was eye-opening. The bot clicked its way from the log-in portal to the payment page in around 15 seconds. (The Globe then released the spot before completing the booking to avoid competing with actual campers.)<\/p>\n Dave Hunt, a spokesperson for Ontario Parks, said the agency uses a variety of safeguards to protect against unauthorized or large-scale automated activity. But AI-assisted tools such as the one used by The Globe, \u201creflect a broader industry challenge\u201d for reservation platforms, he said in an e-mail.<\/p>\n BC Parks and Parks Canada provided similar responses to The Globe\u2019s requests for comment on the AI bot. <\/p>\n Fake reviews are multiplying. Here\u2019s why it will cost you<\/a><\/p>\n One way to remove the advantage of AI bots is to allocate campsites through a random draw. That\u2019s the system Parks Canada already uses when reservations open at its most popular campgrounds. <\/p>\n Users join a virtual waiting room shortly before bookings open for the camping season at a particular park. Then, at a set time, the system randomly assigns everyone in the room a position in a digital queue. As people get to the top of the line, they can reserve sites and dates based on availability \u2013 until everything is booked.<\/p>\n Entering the virtual room early doesn\u2019t grant any advantage, but arriving late lands you at the very back. <\/p>\n Virtual queues are already widely used for anything from concert ticket sales to product launches as a way to distribute small inventories of sought-after goods in an orderly fashion when demand far outstrips supply.<\/p>\n Another benefit: transparency. When consumers queue up in the physical world, \u201cpeople will stand in that line and they will see some kind of order,\u201d said Jesper Essendrop, chief executive of Queue-it., a Copenhagen-based virtual waiting room software provider that has worked with clients including Ticketmaster, Cathay Pacific and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.<\/p>\n Assigning a number in a queue to users online recreates a similar experience, he said. And in a randomized line, a bot holding a spot for a single customer doesn\u2019t affect other people\u2019s chances.<\/p>\n \u201cIt should be part of the lottery and it should have a place in line,\u201d Mr. Essendrop said, referring to this type of bot. <\/p>\n The tricky part is figuring out which bots have legitimate intentions and which ones are up to no good, he added. Until recently, bot detection was all about distinguishing between human users and automated agents, which were generally assumed to be bad actors that should be blocked. <\/p>\n But with people now using AI agents to do their shopping and make their bookings, virtual lines need the digital equivalent of a bouncer at the door who\u2019s able to tell a well-behaved bot from a mischievous one, according to Mr. Essendrop.<\/p>\n Those authentication standards, which vet a bot by verifying its mandate, are still emerging, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt will be a huge challenge for e-commerce companies, ticketing companies and public institutions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n