alt Hacker NewsWhy wouldn't I use AI to shop for clothes? I'm not much into fashion, but I could see using AI to help me search for a winter parka that meets my needs, for example.
And I did use AI recently when shopping for a car. After doing a bunch of research on my own, I decided why not try feeding my criteria into ChatGPT and see what it recommends. And it did actually recommend a couple of models that I had not previously considered, including one that I ended up considering very seriously.
I also pointed it towards some used listings and asked questions like "does this listing have ventilated rear seats" - and it was able to respond that it likely doesn't, and told me where to look for the controls in photos to verify for certain. I probably could have figured out on my own with a bit of digging, or else contact the seller, but this was a pretty quick and easy way to get the information I was looking for.
Is that gross?
I didn't look too closely at the Googlebook, so I don't know why I would use that instead of just an app on my MacBook. But at some point when competent models can be run on comodity hardware I think hardware and OS-level support for AI will definitely become a selling point for me. We're just not quite there yet.
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Given how Search-Engine-Optimisation (SEO) has been gamed, what will make you think that somehow this NEW system, that's really prone to prompt hacking & already promotes sponsors' products over alternatives, won't be?
Nobody is picking their laptop for the best AI integration. You can do those things just as well on every other platform. In fact, additional AI integration is universally a turnoff to most normal people.
My terse answer to, 'Why not use AI to shop for [X]' is that if you are letting AI do the shopping for you at any level, you aren't actually distinguishing products by features or quality or it's ability to solve a problem. You are being fed junk that is likely paid to be moved to the top of the list.
It's probably a nice feeling when you can put in a list of soft requirements to ChatGPT et al and get a list of things it recommends, but I would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.
In an era where the gap between a 'good product' and a 'bad product' is growing ever larger and the price is not an indicator of anything, the onus to actually become knowledgeable re: "How to identify products worth buying" is becoming greater and greater. If you are using AI to do the shopping for you, not only are you not building that muscle, you are actively weakening it as a chatbot convincingly recommends something to you based on unverifiable platitudes about 'quality' and 'value' - a recommendation that was, again, bought and paid for.
So yeah, that's gross and I would argue pretty strongly that it's just as brain rot adjacent as something like Tiktok. Like Tiktok though, I expect it will see at least some level of popular use, and also like Tiktok, I think it'll end up making the population dumber on average.
I guess the pragmatic answer is that you don’t need AI for that. You need good filters. I don’t like Zalando one bit, but I’ll grant them that it’s easy to find the right clothes on their website because they have very good filters.
LLMs don’t ‘know’ if a pair of jeans is a tapered slim fit with a gusseted crotch, at least not by default. But if the brand uploaded them as such, the filters will find them.
That’s just a quick take. I’ve tried to shop with LLMs and the results are mediocre at best. Of course search, filtering, and content tagging could always be improved, instead of “just slap AI on it”.