This just shows how bad search engines have become. About 15 years ago you could type fully worded questions into Google and would be pointed to the exact sentence of a website that answers your question. I happened so slowly, we were all frogs in boiling water.

An the same will happen to AI. We will remember these days as the golden age for AI, where you weren't required to prompt an AI three times before it answers with a non-ad response.

This is kinda the exception that proves the rule. I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience, but I will bet you anything that any searches you try to do will lead you to the same half-dozen giant mail-order clothing vendors that everyone already knows about.

Yeah, that’s how AI should be used. If the ad was using AI as a tool to solve a real problem then I’d be down. But that’s not what this is. This is AI as a shopping cart, or a thing to organize the busy life of a casually rich person who flies to Japan to buy vintage clothes. Basically I’m only saying the ad is wildly out of touch with reality.

There have been several startups focused on helping consumers find clothes that fit properly due to lack of consistent sizing between brands (or dress size "inflation" for women). Some of these used optical or laser scanners, or asked consumers to measure themselves. I think they're all dead or on life support now, but it still feels like there's a profitable business opportunity in there somewhere?

Heh when I came to this country I was overjoyed to see that they had a "Big & Tall" store. Until I realized they actually meant the conjunction there...

I use chatGPT to track my nutrition goals, and adjust exercises. I also let it code review my personal projects to (at worst) gain exposure to new patterns.

I wouldn't buy a deeply-ingrained AI laptop even if you paid me, and even then I'd install Linux on it in a heartbeat.

Researched men's sneakers last night. Super conflicting TMI for my odd size so going to a store for human sizing and gait evaluation. Info on durability was complete garbage. Suspicious about tuning for favored brands but AI recommended shoes will have the edge in my purchase decision since I've done some research.

Did it work? Did you buy something?

Yes, you used it but in a way not even remotely close to how they envision you should use it.

But I did this with Google before the LLMs

I recently used AI to shop for clothes. A T-shirt I liked and wanted more of had doubled in price due to tariffs, while some shorts that needed replacement had been discontinued. AI helped identify alternatives with comparable fit and fabric that were respectively domestic and available, which would have been a much bigger hassle pre-AI.

Imagine you could take a few photos of yourself and a system would find your real-life doppelgangers around the world. Then see what they wear and easily copy them. They get a commission.

Or have shopping items be shown on your twin in a simulated fashion shoot on a doppelganger simulation. It should also show movement, situations and vibes.

"Turning Doug Quaid back into Carl Hauser"

My brother in size Small-Tall, tell me where you shop!

This is a good one: https://tallslimtees.com/

I also do some made to order from Son of a Tailor and Proper Cloth, but it’s expensive and laborious and slow and risky.

Hi. What AI and procedure did you use for this? I am also looking for good formal clothes that fit my broad shoulders but narrow waist than typical mass market clothes shoot for

You scrape sites, okay, but what's "ai" got to do with that (I assume ai means chat bots in this context?)

I'm genuinely curious, whatever you're doing sounds cool, but more details beyond the buzzword pitch you'd tell your manager would be welcome on a hard technical site like hn?

(ftr, I'm skeptical of all applications of machine learning, but I keep experimenting with all the various kinds of it, generally with no good result; last real-world useful [to any extent] ml model I tried was BASnet, but whatever you tinkered out sounds cool and if it actually scrapes and filters clothes the way you describe, that'd be quite cool [perhaps even product worthy…?], cuz there are way too many clothes online to look at all of them manually and then esp. on fast fashion sites, there are oftentimes reviews you want to be wary for that indicate low quality products… anyway, that just sounds impossible to automate in my experience, but feel free to prove otherwise)

A good friend of mine has the opposite problem. I'm 5'11" (180cm) with a slender frame and long arms. A small Patagonia jacket fits me great.

My friend is probably 5" shorter than me. A small on him would be too long.

So he's always on the hunt for things that fit him properly in both dimensions.

You realize that if anything, this way of using AI for shopping is something corporate would rather hate?

By using AI to filter out results, you don't see ads, upsells, other products, recommendations, reviews, dark patterns, etc.

What were your results? I'm nearly the exact same height with a shorter torso than leg length but super long arms, so I tend to need a medium tall, 36" inseam pants.

Wow, I’m in the same boat - do you mind sharing more about how you did it? I was thinking about that too (I’m 197cm) and would love to learn!

I asked Gemini for help with something similar recently and it just made up a bunch of stores and items. When I pointed it out it said sorry and that it won't do it again. Then it did it again.

I use AI regularly to consider new looks. Just have it render someone like me in different outfits. Super useful.

Hilariously I've done something similar for the same reason. Medium shirts/sweaters are generally too short on me but large sizes feel baggy. I only travel occasionally to the US for work, so last trip I had ChatGPU look at several US-based retailers (eg Land's End, LL Bean, American Tall) to see if there was stuff in stock I might want to have shipped to my office/hotel.

Your valid use case doesn't contradict the point that so far most consumer-focused "AI features" are rarely useful and often just get in the way. I'm pretty sure a specific "AI Shopping Feature" wouldn't actually do what you're already doing, or if it did, it would add more steps/distractions than you have now.

Just asking a web search / browser-enabled chatbot, as you are now, is already close to the optimally efficient tool for you. Unfortunately, aggregating results from many disparate retailers into one seller-neutral page filtered down to what you uniquely need today is no longer considered optimally efficient by most web retailers. Just like they erected barriers to stop being indexed by unaffiliated shopping aggregators, most large retailers will try to stop automatic aggregation of their current inventory (or lack thereof).

Sadly, we're now in a post-enshittification world where Amazon's learned removing search features like requiring or excluding terms increases revenue and Google's learned giving you the search result you want first reduces ads served.

I feel the real problem is poor standardized sizing for clothing in store and worse online. I swear every store has their own unique sizes and when it comes to no names on sites like Amazon it's just pure good luck.

As far as this laptop is concerned I feel like it's a repeat of that super expensive chrome book that fizzled out because it was basically nerfed by Google unshockingly. As one of the top posters here if they delivered quality hardware, good Linux and solid Google support and even gapps, this would be an absolute win. instead i can only guess what this is unless I missed any real information on the site it's just a metal Chromebook with extra AI?

Hacker News demographics isn’t real!

I mean, same on the struggle as a tall person, but doing that kind of research is pretty easy even without AI. Just find a couple brands that fit and some shops that sell them and you're pretty much set. I buy almost all my t-shirts from a specific company for tall people now, that I found on amazon by typing in something like "tall t-shirts"

I’m sorry but I’m not buying this argument. This problem was solved in 2005 with search engines.

> I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores

I wonder if for the next period websites will really try hard to prevent scraping (already happening, in some industries very pervasive, i.e. its impossible to get accurate quote for power) until they realize they can sell much more to people using agents.

Or everything just going to race to the bottom like a manufacturer or distributor since it's so easy to find everything anything you need. Kinda already happening with saas companies loosing value while infrastructure is soaring.

I'm a similar build and I could imagine using ai for this purpose but come on. 194cm is like top 1% of human height. It's not a solid business model.

As 204cm human, I have also built a thing to scrape all the major brands for LT sizes.

It is deeply annoying we have to do this.

AI is good for shopping today because all other platforms are fully enshitified but AI is still in the pre-enshitification phase. It will be infested with ads soon enough. Enjoy it while you can.

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