Tourist police and airport security staff spent Tuesday evening trying to sort out one of the stranger cases they’ve had in a while: a 66-year-old woman from Lampang who’d travelled alone to Chiang Mai International Airport to meet a man she believed was a pilot named “Chai.” He doesn’t exist. Or rather, he exists only as an AI character she’d been chatting with on Facebook.
The call came in around 8pm, when airport security spotted the woman wandering the terminal by herself, clearly waiting for someone who wasn’t coming. Officers who approached her found the conversation difficult going, since she mostly spoke a hill tribe language and her account of things kept slipping in and out of coherence. Piecing it together, they worked out that she’d fallen for an AI-generated character on social media, convinced herself he was real, and made her own way from Lampang by bus before catching a ride to the airport to finally meet him in person.
Her son, it turned out, had no idea she’d left home at all. Tourist police tracked him down to explain the situation while airport staff got her settled somewhere safe, with food, water and a blanket, until arrangements could be made the next day to get her back to Lampang.
