I know what you are thinking: what does hospitality have to do with plagiarism? Well, it all started when Justin Taillon ( a professor and department head at Highline College who also serves as Global President of Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals) learned that AI has been rejecting 25% of original resumes.
In other words, it is not really a culinary challenge but more of a reputational and professional challenge. The hospitality industry is getting trapped in the plagiarism trap, and relying on AI has now become a crisis.
Read along as we understand this in a bit more detail with numbers, analysis, and professional expert opinions for better clarity. 🫡
What's Actually Happening With AI and Plagiarism Right Now
Let us go back and understand where it all began. Justin Taillon, in the AI and the Plagiarism Trap, says that “A hospitality HR executive reports that 25% of resumes are automatically rejected due to AI plagiarism detection.”
Now this is not how an essay gets rejected for reading as if a robot wrote it. Or, somehow the research is an exact copy of a paper written decades ago. This one is a bit different and cruel because the candidate never gets to know what they actually did wrong.
This is about employed professionals in hotels, in resorts, and in restaurant groups getting straight-out rejected even before an actual screening. Why? Because the AI was unable to keep up.
Now this is exactly where the problem lies because no one ever acknowledges this gap. To begin with, AI in the hospitality space seems a bit odd anyway. What does AI have to do with flavors or how my hotel bed is made? Yes, the conferences do talk about AI risks like corporate espionage and data leaks, but that’s it.
Yet they never discuss the potential risk AI possesses. How it can actually derail the entire career of a training staff, or reject a pool of people who were aptly suited for the job! Even before anyone could raise an alarm.
Why This Hits Hospitality Professionals Harder Than People Expect
Well, the Hospitality industry is dynamic and a fast-paced industry. Think about it from a hiring manager's perspective: what seems more chaotic? Hiring a lawyer for a firm or staff for the entire lobby?
Now, if you go back to Justin’s article, it talks about how Justin’s advisory VP of HR had more than 60,000 global team members. It is only evident that they will run to an AI setup for respite when it comes to hiring. Moreover, no HR team is reading every resume by hand anyway.
So, the bridge between a potential perfect candidate and the job is a robotic screening process that has no idea of the intensity. All it identifies are a few patterns and sentences.
That’s not it; there is another bigger crisis. A lot of hospitality hiring happens at entry level, front desk, housekeeping, F&B, etc. Now these are exactly the roles where candidates are usually younger and less experienced at writing formal resumes and end up being the prey for a high-end AI setup.
Also, think about the irony at this point. An industry that survives on being welcoming rarely shows the same grace. Especially to the ones who are usually holding the fort. They are penalized on a daily basis for using ChatGPT that only refined a few lines here and there.
Ways AI Plagiarism Sneaks Into Hospitality Work
If we have to get ahead of plagiarism in the hospitality sector, we have to identify it first. Simply because here it is not as prominent and visible as writing an essay or duplicating a paper.
It gets your resume auto-rejected before a human ever sees it
As we have talked about so far, the AI that we relied on for scalability and efficiency brought in a bigger problem. It started rejecting genuine candidates in the name of plagiarism simply because the CVs had recurring patterns and mentions.
Hospitality employees write far more than people think
Even though we started this blog with our focus on the candidate rejections, there are other layers to this story as well. Yes, the unfair rejections of the candidates are concerning, but so is a tarnished brand reputation. It is one of those sectors that take decades to recover from a fall and hence need to be more aware of how AI controls the narrative.
For example, managers, supervisors, and corporate teams constantly write:
- Marketing copy
- Hotel website descriptions
- Guest complaint responses
- SOPs
- Training manuals
- Shift handover
- Incident reports
- Performance reviews
- Internal emails
Now, the moment this gets drafted by ChatGPT or any other popular AI tool without checking the words or ideas it creates a problem. Imagine being called out on social media simply because you didn’t check your AI brief! Everyone thinks you are trying to copy a small business or worse, your competitors.
Hotel brands care about consistency
Imagine that you are working for the big-shot brands where each document reflects the company's reputation. If employees begin copying AI-generated SOPs, guest communication templates, or marketing material without proper review, it creates inconsistencies and questions the very nature of the brand itself.
It raises questions about its authenticity, its willingness to serve its real-time customers, and so on.
Why AI Plagiarism is hurting guest trust
Two articles published by Skift help us understand this better with a few significant observations:
- It reports how the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research, in partnership with Curacity, did a quick research with 1,029 U.S. travelers that pointed out that: More than 60% said they were concerned about the accuracy of AI-generated results, while over 40% said they did not trust AI because its responses were generic and lacked true clarity.
- Now, the second one, a report by Curacity published by Skift (in partnership with Afar, Travel + Leisure, Fathom, and A Hotel Life), says that 75% of travelers are more likely to book after reading content they trust.
In other words, the present crisis is not just about losing out on potential candidates. But about getting a direct hit on revenue itself, not to mention the brand reputational damage caused by AI content.
AI chatbots have already gotten a travel company successfully sued for misinformation
No one talks about how the use of AI in hospitality looks in real life. The problem is one can be an AI enthusiast in real time and yet expect a real-time human connection and reviews. Simply because the hospitality sector is built on experience, and people do not want a robot misleading them. And this is not some hypothetical observation.
In Moffatt v. Air Canada, decided in February 2024, the website chatbot incorrectly told a customer that they could claim a bereavement fare discount after buying their ticket. The customer trusted the information, booked the flight, and later sued when Air Canada refused to provide the refund.
Now, the tribunal member rejected Air Canada's argument that the chatbot was a "separate legal entity" responsible for its own words. And reinstated that a company is liable for everything on its website, whether it's simply another page or an AI chatbot answering queries.
How to Actually Protect Yourself
After reading all this, you must be thinking that the best way out is to not rely on AI. But the solution lies in not avoiding AI, but in understanding how it can actually add value to your existing workflow. If you go back to Taillon himself, the person who started this entire discussion, he relies on AI himself and calls it a revolutionary tool worth using. It is just that if you wish to make the most out of it, you simply have to keep a few things in mind.
- When you are building your resume with AI, make sure you do not add something you cannot personally verify, be it a resume bullet or a guest-facing claim. Every claim you add should be personalized and should come from a place of real-life experience.
- Do not treat the AI draft as your final edit. Every AI tool follows a certain pattern, and you need the speed and efficiency it offers, not the repetition. So you rely on AI to write your first draft, be it your resume, your guest-facing documents, or your marketing copy, and then rewrite it one more time in your own words. You can also rely on HumanizeAI.io to refine it further and make it sound more natural.
- Disclose the use of AI where it is expected. For example, if it is bylined content, coursework, or anything attached with your name that could go under scrutiny later, make sure you disclose that you used AI.
- Most importantly, from an organization's standpoint, a 25% rejection rate at the hiring stage is not sustainable. The fix is simple: no resume should be auto-rejected on an AI detection score alone. All the rejected resumes should at least be checked by a human reviewer before going into the pile.
AI Is the Tool, Not the Voice
Contrary to popular AI trends, in hospitality, the plagiarism problem was never really about copying. It is more about trust: trust in hiring, in how you present your guest-facing content, in what you say, in how you shape your brand voice, and in making sure that experience and trust are never jeopardized.
The properties and the professionals, the establishments that get ahead of this present chaos, are the ones doing very simple things. They review resumes. They put disclosure up front. And they tell their guests what exactly is human and what exactly is coming from AI-generated content.
To sum it all up, you have to understand that AI is simply a medium that makes your work easier. It is not your brand voice. It is not your identity. It is not the one who is going to work with the employees that it approves or rejects. This is where you have to step in each day and guide the systems to make sure you are never a part of this chaotic AI relationship.