Tying the bot: Is AI ready to be your wedding planner? Not so fast, say experts

Their wedding went viral, for all the wrong reasons. Last year, a Dutch couple did what so many soulmates do and tapped a friend to officiate their wedding. And, like so many forward-looking couples, they opted to 86 all the “to have and to hold” and obedience malarkey from their vows.

Instead, they promised on the altar to be “not only husband and wife, but above all a team, a crazy couple, each other’s love and each other’s home!” They promised to “keep supporting each other, teasing each other, holding on to each other, even in difficult times.”

Most mod of all, those vows were created by their friend-officiant with the help of ChatGPT.

The ceremony went down without a hitch. But months later, the newlyweds discovered that they were, in fact, no such thing. Their AI-inflected vows had omitted legally required language, and a court ruling demoted them back to boyfriend-girlfriend status.

It’s not just the vows that LLMs are muddling. Event gurus grumble that a growing reliance on AI is multiplying matrimonial mix-ups and they’re increasingly called on to be fixers instead of planners.

Go to Google, eh … we mean Gemini, and search “AI wedding planner” and the results are almost endless: Nupt.ai, Weddie.app, Weddings.io and Bridesmaid for Hire, a virtual wedding-planning hub with over 100 AI tools. But does-it-all (at least some of the time) ChatGPT is most popular. Those AI bots promise to help you find vendors, venues, photogs and florists — even write your vows.

But, “it’s really, really, really inaccurate,” said Alyssa Pettinato, owner of NYC-based Alinato Events. “And everyone out there that’s trying to make it a shortcut for not hiring a planner is learning this the hard way. It’s creating more work. It’s creating meltdowns. I’m getting inquiries now saying, ‘My wedding is in a month. I need somebody, now because I messed up.’ There’s going to be a generation of brides and grooms that are going to f – – k around and find out.”

Still, she said there is one legitimate use for AI.

“AI for planning a wedding is fantastic if you have literally no money to do a wedding and you’re trying to do everything yourself,” she said. “Just make sure you triple-check every single thing it says, because AI is not 100%.”

The more money you’re spending, the larger and more complex your big day is, so the less helpful it becomes, she said.

“Where it gets me absolutely messed up is when somebody is hosting a 600 person wedding at Cipriani, which we all know is six figures just for the venue, and they’re using ChatGPT,” Pettinato said. “You clearly can afford a planner. You are spending money to host everyone in your life for a celebration of your love. Why on earth would you not want professionals that know what they’re doing at the helm of that?”

Pettinato says that AI fails DIYers on two fronts. First, it can’t properly vet vendors. She recently had to fire an “absolute disaster” of a photographer. He came via ChatGPT, but just because someone is the top result doesn’t mean they are the right fit, she said.

The second problem is pricing.

“If you ask ChatGPT, ‘What is the budget I need for a wedding in New York City?’ It’s going to tell you some crazy stuff. It’s not accurate,” she said.

We tried it. Here’s what Skynet said: “Typical cost (150 guests): around $75,000 to $100,000-plus for a ceremony and reception.” Pettinato calls that laughably unrealistic, with many venues in the city starting at $80,000.

“If you ask it, ‘What are the best venues in New York City to get married at?’ It’s just going to regurgitate all of the top venues on Google to you. But there are a million venues that are not even listed that planners know about, and the prices could be from something from Reddit in 2020.”

It gets even more complicated when planning a destination “I do.” Brianne Garritano, owner of Chicago-based Michigan Avenue Events, said that when she was planning the recent wedding of MLB player Jake Cronenworth to sports reporter Brooke Fletcher at the St. Regis Kanai Resort in Riviera Maya, Mexico, Fletcher presented her with an AI-generated design to get the ball rolling. It was beautiful but not entirely feasible.

“The ballroom was a blank canvas so we had to bring in all of the design. The AI image was a lovely starting point, but we had to rely on sourcing an incredible floral designer, a rigging team and an audiovisual team locally,” said Garritano. To perfectly match the AI image would be next to impossible — for one thing, the local flowers were different. To fly all of it in would have added two zeros to the cost, Garritano said.

In the end, she created a lovely custom wedding design using local talent that she personally vetted, but the result was necessarily quite different. And that’s the other thing about using AI design: Because it’s custom, it’s going to be more expensive to create. AI also lacks info about local talent, which may not have a major web presence.

“What AI doesn’t do, is show you all of the people, the actual humans, that it takes to produce that image in real life,” said Garritano. “Do the humans needed to achieve the desired design even exist in a certain region, city or location? I think AI creates unrealistic expectations.”

Nevertheless, planners seem to agree that they’re not worried about being replaced by robots — they know that pulling off the perfect event takes experience, human-connection and lots of craft.

“Your wedding planner is your advocate. Your wedding planner is your insurance. Your wedding planner is your confidant,” said Garritano, noting that a planner would have prevented the headache our viral Dutch couple experienced. “We oversee everything, because we know that there are always these little things that pop up.”