Should You Let ChatGPT Choose Where You Live in France?

Apparently, people are doing exactly that

A few years ago, asking a computer where you should move would have sounded slightly ridiculous. Today, people do it all the time.

They tell ChatGPT or another AI tool their budget, age, family situation, climate preferences, language ability, need for an airport, desire for markets, healthcare, restaurants, schools or countryside, and then ask the obvious question: Where should I live in France?

And actually, this makes quite a lot of sense. France is a wonderfully difficult country to choose from. You have large cities, small cities, market towns, villages, mountains, Atlantic coast, Mediterranean coast, deep countryside and approximately seventeen thousand beautiful places somebody on Facebook will insist are “the real France.”

When faced with that amount of choice, having something help organise the mess is useful. I use AI constantly myself, so I am hardly going to tell you to switch it off and return to a 1998 Michelin guide. But I would make one distinction very clearly. AI can be extremely good at helping you think about where to live. That is not quite the same thing as knowing where you should live.

Why AI is actually very good at the beginning

The great strength of AI is that it lets you explore without much friction.

You can say: “We are a retired American couple with a €600,000 property budget. We want sunshine, a walkable town, restaurants open outside the tourist season, reasonable access to an international airport and good healthcare. We don’t need a large expat community, but we don’t want to feel isolated either.”

That is already far more useful than typing “best places to retire in France” into Google and receiving the usual list of Bordeaux, Nice, Lyon and several places apparently selected because somebody once wrote a travel article about them. Then you can keep going.

What if the airport matters less? What if you want more land? What if your budget drops to €450,000? What if you want to reach Paris by train? What if you hate very hot summers? What if one of you wants village life and the other secretly wants restaurants?

AI is very good at this kind of iterative conversation because changing one variable takes seconds. You can test ten versions of your future life without buying an airline ticket or feeling that you are wasting somebody’s professional time.

It is also wonderfully non-judgmental. You can ask embarrassingly basic questions at eleven o’clock at night and nobody sighs. That has real value.

It can also introduce you to places you never considered

One of the most interesting examples in my earlier research involved Julie Neis, an American who had already lived in France and was looking for somewhere calmer after burning out in Paris.

She described what she wanted to ChatGPT: sunshine, culture, markets, walkability, community and a slower rhythm. The system eventually suggested several places, including Uzès. Julie had never heard of it. She visited. That is exactly the kind of thing AI can do brilliantly. It can widen the map.

Before AI, somebody might have started with the places they already knew from holidays, friends or television: Provence, Bordeaux, Dordogne, the Côte d’Azur. AI can take a set of criteria and surface places outside that familiar little circle.

And sometimes, that one suggestion is enough to send you somewhere you would never otherwise have explored.

Then comes the dangerous bit: it sounds very confident

The problem begins when useful exploration starts feeling like expertise.

AI produces beautifully organised answers. It can rank towns, explain pros and cons, compare housing prices, discuss healthcare access and tell you whether somewhere has an “active cultural scene.”

All of this sounds remarkably authoritative. Unfortunately, some of it can also be generic, outdated or simply wrong. More importantly, there are aspects of place that are very difficult to reduce to information.

A town may technically have restaurants, but are they open in January? A village may be twenty minutes from a hospital, but what does that road feel like at night in winter? An area may be described as “international,” but is that genuinely useful social diversity or simply a concentration of second-home owners who disappear for six months?

Two villages ten kilometres apart can look almost identical in a database and generate completely different lives. That is where the computer begins to struggle.

France gets very granular, very quickly

French geography is deceptive.

You can sensibly ask AI whether the Dordogne or Provence suits you better. You can probably get a useful first comparison between Montpellier and Toulouse. But property decisions eventually become much more microscopic.

Should you live in the famous town or one of the villages around it? Which side of the town? How annoying is the road into it in summer? Where do you actually shop? What happens on a wet Tuesday in February? Is the pretty village alive, or does everybody drive elsewhere for daily life?

Those are often the questions that determine whether somebody loves living somewhere. And they are also precisely the things most poorly represented in online information.

Use AI as your very patient research assistant

So my suggestion is not to use AI less. Quite the opposite. Use it aggressively at the beginning.

Ask it to help define your criteria. Ask it to challenge contradictions in what you think you want. Ask for ten possible regions, then five, then three. Ask it what you may have forgotten. Ask it to design questions for your reconnaissance trip. Ask it to compare transport, climate, healthcare and indicative property prices.

Then make it show its homework where the answer matters. For visas, tax, legal questions, residency, healthcare rules or anything else capable of costing you serious money, check official sources or qualified professionals.

And when the shortlist gets small, leave the screen. Go there. Walk around. Drive the roads. Sit in the café. Visit the supermarket. Look at actual houses. Talk to people. See how the place feels at eight in the morning rather than five in the afternoon after a very nice lunch.

 

The best answer is probably AI plus reality

The interesting question therefore isn’t whether AI will replace relocation advisers. In some simple cases, people probably won't need much human help at all. They can research, organise and execute a move perfectly well themselves, with AI making the process substantially easier.

For more complicated moves, the sensible model is likely to be a mixture. AI does the broad research, scenario testing, checklists and preparation. Humans become valuable when the questions get specific, local, emotional, expensive or unpredictable. Which is actually quite a good division of labour.

AI can tell you that Uzès exists. It can explain why you might like it. It can compare it with twenty other places before breakfast. But if you are seriously considering spending €700,000 and the next ten years of your life there, I would still recommend meeting Uzès in person.

Get the free guide