这个故事最初出现在High Country News上，也是气候服务台合作的一部分。
当三个徒步者从北加州沙斯塔山的岩石面部求救时，他们没有带来足够的食物，他们没有在下午深夜回头，正如他们后来承认的那样，他们缺乏准备和规划不周，部分原因是依赖Google的人工智能聊天员Gemini。 到了早上，他们迷路了，在山上的一块地上，一个徒步者撞到了他的膝盖。
许多人来时毫无准备，称 Nick Meyers是美国森林局计划主管Shasta Wilderness山攀登及Avalanche中心，但我认为他们已经把脑子关了。
在人工智能的帮助下，另一名Shasta山游客在“不露营”标志附近扎下帐篷，坚持她有权这样做，因为大赦国际告诉她可以，Meyers 称。 他的团队还遇到一个在小径头徘徊的男子，他带着AI生成的地图，在附近一座山的错侧显示显著特征。 在不列颠哥伦比亚省，一架直升机机组人员从王冠山背面的寡妇匠阿雷特的悬崖上救出了一名16岁的徒步者。 这十几岁的孩子利用Anthropic的聊天员Claude帮助他计划自己的旅行。 尽管旅行者称后来还查阅了Google地图和流行的徒步应用AllTrails
怀俄明州大泰顿国家公园在过去一年里也出现了一个显著的上升，即使用AI进行旅行信息报道的游客比例为称公园总监奇普·詹金斯。 “从零上升到26%。 我猜曲线不会变平。
AI使用量的增加是否会导致后国事故和搜救活动增加，迈耶斯·称。 他的办公室负责监督北加州的一片大片荒野地区，平均每年有十几次救援，2026年逐渐形成为平均一年。 与2025年相比，怀俄明州搜救的呼声实际上已经下降，2026年至今只有312个呼号，而2025年的呼号总数是466个，2024年为377个。
一些搜救老兵表示，AI聊天机只是给人带来新的麻烦方式的最新工具。 大约十年前，当徒步者、背包者、登山者和其他户外爱好者开始从Instagram和其他社交媒体网站获得目的地、灵感和信息时，他们有时面临致命的后果。 在此之前，徒步旅行者和其他娱乐者由于依赖Google地图或智能手机连接而被误导。
称 Jim Moss是一名科罗拉多州的娱乐律师及搜救志愿者。 机器人的建议会如何影响这些人
转而使用AI聊天机进行引导确实带来了独特的风险。 Chatbots可以“吸入”有说服力地将错误信息说成是真实的，使用错误信息会导致一种叫做“认知投降”的现象。 称 Chris Flathmann是南卡罗来纳州克莱姆森大学的以人为中心的计算教授，曾研究过AI和搜索与救援。
他解释说，“当人类与人工智能系统合作时，他们可以深入其中，他们可以为自己放弃批判性思维”。 当AI假扮成一个不熟悉话题的专家时，“你不能因为你没有专业知识，一旦你停止批判性思考，它可能很难重新开始，特别是在一个紧张的后国局势中。
Chatbots也倾向于告诉用户他们想要听到什么，Claude或ChatGPT可能会回答一个问询，给出广泛的方向和建议，这些方向和建议听起来可信，但实际上是从Reddit线程和过时的YouTube视频中刮去的——甚至可能完全是捏造的。
TikTok和Instagram可能提供观众的灵感，但AI倾向于提供指示——对或错——以及鼓励，Flathmann 称。 “AI并不是想欺骗人们上山，但我认为这是当你得到这样的工具时所发生的自然演变。
不论使用何种资源，专家都有同样的意见：当您前往一个新地方时，请确保您根据可靠、权威的资讯来源，更妙的是，与真人指南，国家森林官员，或公园护林员交谈。
“如果你要去一个会杀了你的地方，” Meyers 称，“你应该认真对待你的计划。 ”
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This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
By the time the three hikers called for help from a rocky face on Mount Shasta in Northern California, they’d made a series of bad decisions. They didn’t bring enough food, and they’d overestimated their fitness. Instead of turning back in late afternoon when they hadn’t yet reached the top, they summited at 7:30 pm and had to descend in the dark. Their lack of preparation and poor planning, as they admitted later, came partly from relying on Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini. By morning, they were lost on a gnarly part of the mountain, and one hiker had banged up his knee.
“We get plenty of people who come unprepared or don’t do any research at all. To these guys’ credit, they did try,” said Nick Meyers, US Forest Service program manager of the Mount Shasta Wilderness Climbing and Avalanche Center, which responded to the call. “But I think they kind of turned their brains off.”
The three 20-year-olds aren’t the only ones making missteps in wild spaces with the help of artificial intelligence. Another Mount Shasta visitor pitched her tent near a “No Camping” sign, insisting she had a right to do so because AI told her she could, Meyers said. His team also encountered a man wandering around at a trailhead with an AI-generated map that showed prominent features on the wrong side of a nearby mountain. In British Columbia, a helicopter crew rescued a 16-year-old hiker from a ledge in the Widowmaker Arete on the back of Crown Mountain. The teen had used Anthropic’s chatbot Claude to help him plan his trip. News stories focused on that fact went viral across Canada and the US, though the hiker said later that he also consulted Google Maps and the popular hiking app, AllTrails.
Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming has also seen a marked uptick over the past year in the percentage of visitors who report using AI for travel information, said Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins. “It went from zero to 26 percent. And I’m guessing that curve is not going to flatten.”
It remains to be seen whether increasing AI use will lead to an increase in backcountry accidents and search and rescues, Meyers said. His office, which oversees a massive wilderness area in Northern California, averages a dozen rescues each year, and 2026 is shaping up to be an average year. Calls to search and rescue in Wyoming have actually gone down compared to 2025, with only 312 calls so far in 2026 compared to a total of 466 in 2025 and 377 in 2024.
Some search and rescue veterans say that AI chatbots are just the latest tools giving people new ways to get into trouble. Roughly a decade ago, when hikers, backpackers, climbers and other outdoor enthusiasts began to source their destinations, inspiration, and information from Instagram and other social media sites, they faced sometimes deadly consequences. Before that, hikers and other recreationists were led astray by their reliance on Google Maps or smartphone connectivity.
“Over the last two decades, there’s been a phenomenal push in the media to get more people outdoors, and consequently we have more people outdoors and recreating,” said Jim Moss, a Colorado-based recreation attorney and search and rescue volunteer. It’s still unclear how questionable advice from a robot will influence all those people, he added.
Turning to an AI chatbot for guidance does come with unique risks. Chatbots can “hallucinate” persuasively presenting misinformation as real, and their use can lead to a phenomenon called “cognitive surrender,” said Chris Flathmann, a human-centered computing professor at Clemson University in South Carolina who has studied AI and search and rescue.
“When humans work with AI systems, they can get so deep into it they give up thinking critically for themselves,” he explained. When AI pretends to be an expert on an unfamiliar topic, “you can’t call BS on that because you don’t have the expertise.” And once you stop thinking critically, it can be hard to start again, especially in a stressful backcountry situation.
Chatbots also tend to tell users what they want to hear and to do so with authority regardless of whether the sources they’re consulting are reliable, Flathmann and others said. Claude or ChatGPT might answer a query with extensive directions and advice that sound credible but are actually scraped from Reddit threads and out-of-date YouTube videos—and might even be entirely fabricated.
TikTok and Instagram may offer a viewer inspiration, but AI tends to offer instructions—right or wrong—as well as encouragement, Flathmann said. “AI isn’t trying to trick people into going up mountains, but I think it’s the natural evolution of what happens when you get a tool like this.”
Regardless of the resources recreators use, experts have the same advice: When you’re headed to a new place, make sure you double-check your information against reliable, authoritative sources like up-to-date public-land agency maps and websites, trail association websites, or guidebooks. Even better, talk to a real-live guide, a national forest official, or a park ranger.
“If you’re going to go into places that will kill you,” Meyers said, “you should take your planning seriously.”
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Atlas. All rights belong to the original author.