Comment by Jzush
16 hours ago
Gross. This is just more proof that corporations simply don't know how to market AI. Everything is an ad for an ad at this point. The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
No one is doing that, these people don't exist. No matter how hard corporate America wishes they did. This is why AI doesn't sell. This is why companies like Microsoft and Dell are pulling back on their AI claims and why Apple has nearly wiped it off their site all together, seriously go check out apple.com, not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
At this point I'm convinced that marketing has been completely taken over by shareholder shills, marketing to customers they wish they had instead of the real customers that exist.
> why Apple has nearly wiped it off their site all together, seriously go check out apple.com, not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
TBF, the reason Apple removed "Apple Intelligence" is that they failed to deliver on its promises.
So much so that they just settled their false advertising in a class action lawsuit for $250M:
https://archive.is/efWkb
Also, P.S: Not to say that clothing/shopping is the primary use case, but I know plenty of women who use AI for clothes/fashion/interior decoration etc related tasks.
What feels already like old history is that Apple made a generous deal to OpenAI based on the premise that their AI could do the claims.
Apple engineers spend months trying to prompt engineer their way, thinking the prompter is at fault if the soon to be AGI system diverged. Some of these instructions were trending out there, as reveals of how naive Apple was at the time. They could be traced from the device's logs so not so much of a leak: Don't hallucinate, strictly follow instructions, followed by all sort of refined predicates, appended as if an LLM had reason
Then Apple released a paper to warn everyone (well, a few, and to save face) that we are getting fooled.
https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...
In case Apple is a biased anti AI propagandist, here is a similar, more recent research paper from MIT and co:
https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24755v1
its really hard to read that first apple paper in context when it doesnt have a date on it. I know research papers are meant to be timeless artifacts, but when it says things like "Recent generations of frontier language models... " "frontier LRMs" etc i'd like to know what they were testing on.
Please put a date on your research papers! I could figure it out roughly by looking at the "last accessed" date on their citations - 2025-05-15.
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My wife got upset with me when I dns-blocked all the ads.
It sounds totally insane but we’re the minority here. That’s why Google is a $4.5 trillion company.
I had a similar reaction from in-law family members. The main reason was that they wanted to be able to see the ads that unlocked more gameplay time on their free game.
Just feels crazy to me, but I guess that's what addiction looks like.
In their case it may rather be accepting the subsidies, trading precious time for pennies.
Purchasing upon ads is the opposite. Trading dollars (and freewill) for time (along with painkiller to having to have personal taste)
We are in the minority, but don't think the majority is the opposite and like this kind of thing. The majority just don't care at all about it.
It's really not uncommon for me to speak to someone who actively doesn't want any sort of adblock on their computer. I would say maybe 5% of people, anecdotally, just don't want it, even when you're in front of their computer at that very moment, and offer, and insist that it would take 30 seconds to install. It's not a majority, but I found it surprising.
On the spot. A lot of replies in this thread which outline "useful" AI features fail to acknowledge the same: this is hackernews, and it's a very specific and non representative slice of the population.
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EDRi is in the minority, the EFF is in the minority, and so on. But someone has got to fight the corps, they can’t be the only ones dictating what’s socially acceptable.
Ditto. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she was clicking on the damned things, but then I’d never thought to ask “hey, how did you find out about this useless Chinese plastic crap that lives in a drawer and is never used”.
Sometimes you've got to protect people against themselves...
By that logic though wouldn’t Google have wildly successful products instead of a long line of failures? Googles product strategy is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.
You're on HN, you should be aware of the idea of not needing every product to succeed. They only need 1 in 10, or 1 in 20, or however many moonshots to succeed. You can not like that strategy, but it's basically the entire tech industry.
No one around me cared about Google Reader / their RSS Reader.
Pepole around me don't even know what google is doing besides search and probably maps.
I'm the person with an adblocker, the others are not.
Who is Googles target audiance? Its not me. I might only be a target for when i run some IT Platform in my work as an architect.
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Pretty much all companies have a long line of failed products, only the ones we heard have successful ones. Google is definitely one of the most successful companies ever existed
> Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.
If you're not failing often, you're not an innovative company.
Those failures are funded by a wildly successful product.
People need to understand Google. They have a long line of failures, because they are an innovative company. Their whole goal is to scale products to billions of users. So if they release a product, and they see no path to billions of users they cut it and move on.
This has always been the way Google has worked. This is why they are literally the most successful company in the history of the world.
But they do have wildly successful products.
They also have failures, then again most companies have failures as well at all points in the product cycle.
> By that logic though wouldn’t Google have wildly successful products instead of a long line of failures?
Failures like YouTube, GMail and Android?
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so you're saying Google DOESN'T have wildly successful products? That's definitely a hot take.
This. This is why "sync your files and cast your apps with 0 installs" are even being sold as features.
Normies HATE customizing their devices. Children will literall reach for AI instead of search engines when they just want to change a background image.
Jailbreak is a slur for "Installation" that tech companies want to keep that way.
This is also true.Normies in no situation will customize their device anyhow.
Okay, I just have to pry here: why? Does she like ads?
I don’t block ads. I like buying things. I go to work and make money. I’m going to spend some of it on stuff that looks nice and seems fun. Ads are a good way (not the only good way) to find out about new things to buy.
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My wife also got upset with me over this.
let's be clear: Google is a titan because they successfully sold ads to people who sold to you. We were never the target market beyond building a monopoly on eyeballs, and it's questionable if their ad empire continues. Outside of that they've had very few successes, and while traditionally the hardware is high quality, the bundled services and level of enshitification now is a no-go for my family. If you're buying into the single vendor for the rest of your life, the choice is currently Apple IMO, because they're "least bad".
Why 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.
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”.
It's worth pointing out that in the Googlebook video she's not asking Gemini to shop for her. She starts with a picture of herself, and asks Gemini to combine it with vintage clothing photos from a website she was browsing, to help visualize what she would look like in those clothes.
This is more than just search + filtering. I've done similar things when trying to visualize home improvements, and find that it really is a useful way to help validate my ideas.
So far a lot of the negative responses I've gotten have been along the lines of "only a fool would let AI do your thinking for you". But I find that it's a useful tool sharpening my thinking. Brainstorming, overcoming my own personal biases and gaps in my knowledge, idea validation, etc. Like "rubber ducking" [1], but the duck actually responds with some pretty insightful advice with surprising frequency.
Do I "need" AI for shopping? No, of course not. Can it reduce friction and lead to more informed buying decisions in certain cases? In my experience, yes.
Of course I've seen plenty of useless "just slap AI on it" jobs, too. Netflix put out an AI chatbot that I found particularly egregious, for example (I think maybe they've taken it down since). I didn't find Amazon's "Rufus" to be very trustworthy, either. And I know I'm coming across as pro-AI here, but in other matters I have plenty of serious concerns about AI. I'm just hoping to have a more nuanced conversation than "shopping with AI? Gross!". Or "only a fool would use a product built by greedy corporations!"
[1] https://theconversation.com/stuck-on-a-problem-talking-to-a-...
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?
For me it doesn't need to be a perfect, bias-free information source (no such thing exists). It doesn't need to solve all my problems. It just has to be useful in certain contexts, and I will use it while also trying to be aware of its limitations and conducting my own "sanity checks" to make sure the information can be trusted.
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.
Uhm, the only reason I bought a refurbished laptop last year (an M3 Max with more RAM than I've ever had before) was to run models locally.
If Google was launching a new laptop that was meant to run models locally I would be really excited.
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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 would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.
At no point in the process did ChatGPT direct me to any listings. I fed it my criteria, and it gave back a text response listing car models that met my criteria. The only links it included were links to reddit posts and other car reviews. And the results were useful to me because they pointed out where my own pre-existing biases had caused me to overlook one model that I probably should have paid more attention to.
What you are suggesting feels more like a potential future threat than my actual experience thus far.
I found the listings by conducting a separate search on a used car listing website - and the number of matches that met my criteria were small enough that I was basically able to look exhaustively through all the matches. But shopping for used cars can be a little confusing at times because there are a lot of different configurations that change every year. Sometimes the listing might just say something like "2022 Touring, Safety Package" and include a bunch of photos - and identifying whether a given listing has a particular feature you are looking for requires some investigation (ideally they would include a full list of options, but often times they don't). Or often times the listing itself might contain incorrect information. And I found ChatGPT to be a useful tool for quickly making sense of the various configurations, and of course conduct my own sanity checks to be sure the information is not hallucinated.
I'm not suggesting you should solely rely on AI for shopping (although in some cases for low-risk purchases it may be fine) - but rather as an additional tool to aid in research and decision making.
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I can very clearly imagine it always going for branded products where brand is not required, unless specifically prompted not to, which the average person won't do.
> I need dishwasher tablets
Could mean buy a 30 pack for £25 which have all the marketing buzz surrounding them, or buy the own brand 45 pack for £5 which does the job just as well.
> being fed junk
As if the products you find in mass market brick'n'mortar stores are any different.
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Sry to say this, but I honestly just want a working shopping AI model.
I want to make a picture from me, add perhaps height and one or a second other metric, then i want it to generate styles for me, finetune it with me and then it helps me buy it.
I'm waiting for this for ages as i HATE shopping but I would find it nice to look better.
Nonetheless, when I saw this page for the first time, i was very impressed with the case not with anything related to softeware. Might be a second type of device which might be a good alternative to an apple product. Framework and now this (perhaps)
If such an AI shopping thing existed, I wouldn’t trust it to do a good job. We consumers probably wouldn’t pay enough for it in enough volume to be the customers (Are you a Stitch Fix subscriber? Why not?). The fashion brands would be the customers and we’d be sold to them. The AI tools would tell you and show you that your skin tone really works well with a shirt from $BRAND who bid the highest that day, and the brand that can afford to do that won’t be one with low margins (aka: a good deal), it’ll be one with high margins, and that means some combination of cheap construction and high price.
I'm tall and thin. When i want to shop a sport shirt, i would go to Adidas (german company, german person) and would accept the brand markup just to get something 'stable' and more controlled quality control despite the shirt being a lot cheaper somewere else.
Despite this, adidas does not have a tall thin filter despite them selling tall thin shirts in shops.
I do not know why.
Now i have to start searching around what brands have this option to filter.
I do not know why ecommerce online is so shit at least it feels shit for me.
If AI would find something in that price range and it would just work, man i would be happy.
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If giving the customer more filter/searching power was something companies wanted, Amazon's search result page wouldn't be like visiting a flea market.
I'm pretty sure what Decart is building does exactly what you want.
I saw a demo - it took you, put a piece of clothing on you, and showed in realtime how that clothing moved on your body in the size you'd selected. I think it even picked the size.
> The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist
I don't know what world you live in but I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly) who regularly use ChatGPT to give outfit advice and when clothes shopping. One has manually taken photos of clothes laid out separately so she can put different combinations into ChatGPT and ask if they work together.
I don't live in the US.
"This outfit is bold and shows off your strong personality, a perfect choice for today!"
It's May and you chose a bright green and red sweater with a picture of Santa Clause.
"You're absolutely right! Maybe this would be a better choice for December."
I work routinely from coffee shops. Literally like 80% of people on their laptops have Claude or ChatGPT open when I glance over. Listen, I do think AI still has a LONG way to go to be the automation & productivity utopia we so desperately crave, but underselling its usefulness is just silly at this point.
I used to be vehemently against AI coding just a few years ago, because the hallucinations were a deal-breaker. However, these days, most of my code is written using AI. It's still very "corporate junior" so it takes constant tweaking, hand re-writing, or total re-architecting, but it's leaps and bounds better than what it was. And I find myself working on the interesting parts: product, user experience, novel algorithms, etc.
These Gen AI tools have proved to be incredibly sticky!
I genuinely don’t think when Chat GPT 3.5 launched, that anyone believed people would integrate the usage of them as quickly and solidly as they have.
So Im with you on this, people use Chat GPT, Claude and so on for anything and everything.
> I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly)
You’re on HN and know 4 females, that’s the truly interesting part :-)
Huh, I shopped for clothes using AI today.
Not super relevant to the Googlebook ad, but in case the perspective is interesting to you: I'm quite tall (194cm) but not very wide, so I usually struggle with buying clothes online. I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores to see whether they sold a men's shirt with an LT or slim fit size, in stock, and matching a particular vibe.
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.
The “nice” thing with AI is that the nudging can be so subtle you don’t even realize you’re being influenced for money.
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No you couldnt
You're right but I think AIs can be better than Google at it's height.
But whether it's search or AI-chat, what's annoying is efforts to have it replace that things that exist rather than serving as useful addition. I use ChatGPT X many times a day (or hour) but unless I ask for an AI's opinion, I don't want it.
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.
> exception that proves the rule
That's not how that works; "someone is doing this" doesn't prove a rule "no one is doing this" -- quite the opposite
"The exception that proves the rule" is for things like "closed Thursdays" (rule = open on other days), "no parking after 8 PM" (rule = parking allowed before 8 PM), "no refunds on games" (rule = refunds available on other items), etc.
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It’s not an exception. People seem very short sighted when it comes to AI. Unable to think outside the box for how AI can be helpful or useful.
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ChatGPT has helped me find multiple niche products and vendors. It is really good at that. Products I fruitlessly tried to find for years, ChatGPT found right away.
> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience,
That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail. Everyone is unique, and there are a lot of everyones.
That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.
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I also did a bunch of shopping with AI to identify clothing recently. I was going to DC for a bunch of meetings, and did not have a good sense of what clothes are appropriate in different DC contexts. I did a bunch of iteration with AI to identify something that communicated what I intended, and then ran the final list by a friend with more context to confirm that it was indeed a readable choice.
Just in the last three weeks I cut buying an used car analysis (1-3 months usually) and a new dryer (usually at least a week) to three days total -- this is "time to shortlist" aka "any of the three remaining options will be a great choice".
Using several AI models to cut through the multidimensional sea of options.
It's not all grim, thia technology can genuinely be helpful.
AI helped me shop for some bits and tools that I needed to do my rear differential and brake fluid, and after some nudging, I also got it to do price comparisons for the tools I needed. saved me a lot of time to walk into each store with an exact list on the bits that I needed. And time with getting exactly the tool I needed without overspending.
I previously would have spent this time opening up 4 tabs on three diff hardware store sites, and an additional tab to pull up the relevant car forums for tips and advice. Which I ended up doing anyways, as well as some YouTube videos because I don't trust the results. But it still saved me a ton of time investigating and weighing out options as a decent aggregator of info.
That's fine? Especially if the AI does the searches for me, and does them more frequently than I would.
I have a half dozen facebook marketplace searches going. I used to automate craigslist searches before craigslist became irrelevant. It's nothing complicated but "AI searches for me and notifies me" is better than me remembering to look.
Uhh I don’t think you shop for clothes if you think there’s just a half dozen giant mail order clothing vendors.
Well obviously you shop for clothes, but nowhere like the way people who like clothes shop for clothes.
Finding clothes is about matching the vision in your head. If you’re the type that just buy clothes whatever, this is not a problem that exists in your world.
> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs
You know, everyone used to have specific needs in clothing when I was young. Somehow fast fashion advertised that out of us to solve their own supply chain problems.
Great ideas always start with a niche. Moreover, they almost always start out looking dumb.
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I will do my best to remember your opinion next time I use AI to buy clothes, but given the fact that IDGAF, it's not going to be easy.
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.
What made you believe it is not someone else's real problem? You're simply not targeted audience of the ads
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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?
There are multiple Thai tailors that fly around to major US cities. They'll take your measurements, and then sit down and design a bunch of custom clothes for you.
Quality is amazing, fit is incredible, and the price is only 20-30% more than off the rack, but the clothes can last a decade+.
Sometimes the ancient solution (meet another person with a measuring tape) is the best one.
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Big issue that also seems to unfortunately be more and more common is variations in sizing within the same brand and article of clothing! Different batches with minor variations of the same exact size, or sizes changing over time.
Love the idea but difficult problem to fix.
Quite possibly! But Google Gemini, who obtains the specs from the same flawed, inconsistent, contradictory, or absent size charts that I have to look at, is not positioned to be the solution to this problem.
I don’t think there is. People who care will go out and try the clothes on in the fitting room or just order online and return. That’s a much nicer experience and more foolproof.
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?
Undecided. One of the sites didn't have an LT but the LLM flagged that chest dimensions on their large were narrower than others, so could be worth trying.
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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.
Did it find Girav [1]?
[1] https://www.girav.com/
What did you use a s what was the procedure. I want to find pants similar to ones i got.
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"
This sounds like a terrible idea. Why not just have a simulated fashion shoot of yourself rather than requiring a database of the entire populations likeness to find your doppelganger? Very dystopian
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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)
What "ai" got to do with that would be that he didn't write a scraper and a clothing style ("vibe") categorizer to build a database to process entries in to pick a shop. They just prompted the "ai" (I really don't know why you're putting that in quotes), and it in turn did that for them.
Was it a technically impressive effort from the prompter? No. Are the tools created in the session somehow a massive technical achievement? No. But was it a very useful result? Yes. It took the kind of task that would likely never get done otherwise, and turned it into the kind of thing that got done on a whim.
Doesn't mean that your laptop needs "AI buttons" though.
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good luck scrapping very specific information in a bunch of dynamic websites before AI.
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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
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.
Dunno if it's the best brand in terms of bang for your buck, but I've bought a lot of shirts from "Have it Tall" on amazon and I have zero complaints about the fit. 6'4" and a pretty average build.
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.
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.
It used to be so local (regional) brands had sizes adapted to their demographics. There used to be a thing like Italian, French, German, Scandinavian, etc sizing. I guess for global brands like Patagonia it's going to be challenging to fit everybody into the same – let's say – "M" size.
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.
It's called Gemini because there's two of them responding to you. One that tells the lie, and the other to apologize for telling the lie (which, of course, is just a different lie).
I use AI regularly to consider new looks. Just have it render someone like me in different outfits. Super useful.
Sounds interesting.. can that be done easily?
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.
Just curious, did you check the stores’ sites afterwards for false positives or negatives? eg, “no this store doesn’t have anything for you” but it did?
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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.
Search engines are good for finding shops, but not individual items. There also aren't many shops that are dedicated to only tall, usually big and tall instead.
I don't know how good AI is at these kinds of tasks, but I can tell you that it's not easy manually, especially in some parts of the world where you might have to factor in shipping/return costs.
> 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.
6'4" with relatively proportionate body-parts: buy the tall/long and you're likely good. At your height, all bets are off!
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Can you share it?! Will save me the trouble …
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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I’ve shopped with Claude a few times in the past month alone. It’s really quite good at finding brands I wouldn’t have otherwise.
It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong. A pristine internet rant.
I’m actually amazed and horrified at the same that you have outsourced spending money to robots.
Also aren’t you concerned your behaviour is marketers’ wet dream? They now dictate what you should consume.
I'm not blindly spending money? I'm doing research for specific items. I then research the brands, the materials, the makers, etc. Yes, this is more than most will do, but I'm definitely not giving it my payment info or trusting its recommendations out of hand.
That said, for specific queries—e.g. "I need a linen sportcoat that is beige/natural. What are some brands? My price range is $XXX"—it is very good.
There is a difference between blindly consuming something and consuming something you need to consume anyway.
At least i'm not buying pants every month.
Btw. you know who is buying my stuff? My wife :P
I was tired of getting flat tires on my rider mower, but I was a little afraid of replacing it with the wrong thing. Fed Claude the parts manual and ended up with some good flat-free recommendations.
Got something that fits and is working: something that, even if I'd done some more homework on my own, I might not have gone with because I would have been hung up on finding a perfect, 1:1 replacement.
We all outsourced our spending to “robots” (via targeted ads) a decade and a half ago.
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And I just came back from Seoul where Gemini suggested local clothing labels I would have never found if I hadn't told Gemini what brands I liked already and to find similar ones. And it was bang-on style-wise (some of the shops were really hidden and out of the way).
You sent Anthropic a picture of yourself and had it generate images of you wearing various articles of clothing and then bought them based on the images that it showed you?
>> It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong
Welcome to HN? :)
Could be an AI also.
I use AI heavily for shopping.
“Just had a baby, generate a shopping list for my registry”
“For each major item on registry, research and recommend the top 3 products. I care about GreenGuard certification. I’m not price sensitive.”
“I’m looking for new shoes. I’ve previously owned XYZ models and here’s what I liked/disliked. Can you recommend shoes I should consider?”
It’s immensely helpful. It replaces what I used to do before which was typically search for “[product] Reddit” and read and sift through a ton of comments.
It’s not perfect but the volume of transactions I’d have to do research for is high enough and the return policies easy enough that it makes mistakes feel much easier to correct.
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> No one is shopping for clothes using AI
Tangental rebuttal, but I shop for food using AI every day. Grab app (Asia's equivalent of Uber Eats/DoorDash) has an option "Translate using AI". It (attempts to) translate dishes and ingredients. The app gives a prominent warning (in corporate speak): "these AI translations can be horrendously bad" - and some translations are indeed way off (often hilariously!) but although scrappy, this AI feature is incredibly useful.
Before this feature, I'd have to laboriously screenshot (since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS) then open the screenshot in Google Translate. This only gets you one screen's worth of translations making browsing too arduous.
A shitty AI feature that actually solves a problem is great, whereas a polished AI feature that doesn't is "gross" :)
At the risk of going slightly tangential here...
> since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS
This is all you need to know about mobile to understand we're in a complete duopoly that desperately needs a modern "ma bell" style breakup.
The fuckers who make these devices have zero interest in allowing you to do anything other than spend money with them, of which they will take their cut.
The whole thing feels optimized for trapping users, not enabling them.
To be fair to the fuckers who make these devices, that anti-feature is a choice made by the fuckers who run the delivery apps. Whether text is selectable within an app is up to the app maker.
That's not really "shopping using AI" in any meaningful sense. Or at least it's not in the same spirit as what's being discussed.
Well the other day I used my computer to do a sum, I didn't even know the result, it just gave it to me! Isn't that AGI/ASI? /s
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Have you tried learning the local language?
There isn’t a local language - a quick scan of Grab in Kuala Lumpur shows menus in Mandarin, Bahasa Malaysia, Tamil, English.. Items are entered in a language that suits the food vendor, not necessarily “the local language”. It’s obviously nice if you don’t need translation, but learning a language in five minutes casually scrolling a menu is a tall order, and most locals don't speak 4 languages so they benefit massively from translation just as foreigners do.
No
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist.
Unfortunately, they do. "Normie America" loves that shit. It's why they've been pushing it so hard: it's one of the few areas they're getting serious traction in day to day life.
Not where I’m from. No one has the money to fly to Japan for a shopping trip like this ad suggests. Where do these people exist outside the Bay Area?
We were talking about the clothing mockup using AI: "The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI."
Also, Japan is a cheap travel destination right now. Two people can do a 14 day trip easily for $3000 total. That's not nothing but it's also in the realm of many middle class people regardless of where they live.
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> "Normie America" loves that shit.
Mate I'm in the EU and neighbor has got a statue of big gorilla on his balcony.
The EU is just as consumerist as the US. I can't tell you the number of young dudes who think they look cool because they're wearing a fake Hermes manpurse and who wear a cap as if a videoclip from the 90s from Vanilla Ice just called (don't get me wrong: I love Ice Ice Baby and I read Vanilla Ice is a good person. But it's 2026).
And there have been several EU companies getting funding to create an "AI personal shopper app" (all getting pwned by Google and other big players).
No really: the EU is incredibly consumerist too.
I don't know why your being junked, few companies know more about people than Google. That's why this pos is marketed directly at them.
This was going to be my response, the biggest data miner in the world doesn’t know how users are buying online? That’s a big claim
Are you sure? I think "normies" would prefer to see and try on the clothes they buy.
People will order clothes they see on tiktok without ever having touched them. Having something where their users can basically say "order me that shirt" while they are tiking their tok or rolling their reels, and it works most of the time, is a company's wet dream.
Though, people "want" a lot of things that actually end up making them less happy. So responding to demand doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, but only time will tell.
Yes, I absolutely use AI To find stuff to buy. The results are mediocre but the alternatives are even worse. Google search for any product is SEO garbage. Reddit is somewhat useful for filled with astroturfing and tedious to get actual signal from. AI can summarize the Reddit recommendations and set filters to save time a bit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761821
You wrote this remember
From what I see of my own use and friends use of "AI" - it is a glorified search aggragator with nice pretty print output which has replaced Google search because all involved are tired of wasting time with the cesspool that vanilla search has become.
this is def. the #1 use case, and it's why we can't have nice things. I use the internet to go to places I already know most of the time; when I use a search engine to try and find something it's a complete failure - often because of all the LLM generated astroturfing.
For stores with strong curation, you could just skip the research phase and buy whatever Costco or Lee Valley is selling.
Goodness me, when are we just going to stop buying “products” already?
Meanwhile i just tried to have Gemini AI on my Android read the screen to add an event to my calendar: it can't do it. It could, some year ago, which several articles wrote about. It no longer can.
God this is so annoying. The actual functionality we need is not there or is half-assed.
Someone on HN a few months ago said that they gave up and decided to try Copilot in Outlook, which Outlook kept nagging him to do. He tried the example prompt that the nag screen gave him, whatever it was, and Copilot said 'sorry, I don't have that functionality' or something.
Not only the actual functionality people want is missing, but the functionality they're nagging us to use is missing./
I'm not sure if it's more frustrating or just laughably absurd how often I have experiences like this. Like where an LLM chatbot (mostly Gemini) or other AI tool gives me sample prompts to click and test (so they can show their capabilities, give inspiration etc) and it fails right off the bat.
Out of all things you'd think they'd at least invest some time to run some quality control on the demo options lol.
It's the new assistant on my phone but it can't even set a timer or alarm when I ask it to. Gave up using it after that.
Yes, the first thing I asked an "AI Phone Assistant" to do was set an alarm. It didn't even try and fail, it rejected the request entirely.
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You probably have a custom domain Google account? They have Gemini locked down and barely able to do anything.
Switch to a consumer Gmail account and loads of Google features start working.
I do, indeed. It used to work, so while I get why they would strip down the Workspace accounts of some functionality, at least they should communicate that properly.
I dropped a screenshot and it worked great. Like a screenshot of sports practices.
This worked for me just a few weeks ago
Try now. I tried several times with different types of content/apps displayed, to no avail. It analyzes the screen and tells me whatever Gemini would say, instead of actually doing it.
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Plus the random decision to split Google Assistant functions off from the bottom search bar. I still randomly try to tap that bar with it's mic button to ask the assistant to do something only to have it try to do a Google search. That's leaving aside all the random things that worked rather well in assistant until they started trying to push Gemini, can't think of a reason that should correlate (/s).
I bet that bottom mic is a different team...
Also the homepage search widget, the app drawer search, and chrome address bar search are three near identical experiences, yet with enough differences to be painful. Either unify them, or make them distinct!
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I think this is precisely what made it not work anymore.
I don't really get why people have the audacity to presume what other people like and do.
You are not every other person. People are different from you.
While I 100% agree Ai is getting shoved down people's throats by tech giants, I would never presume to know how people are using it.
More people are discovering it, at least, as a better search box than Google. There's at least data behind that.
It isn't too far of a jump to then have it shop for you as well.
One thing that is interesting with stories like this: the wild, emotional responses Ai-related news gets out of people.
> I don't really get why people have the audacity to presume what other people like and do.
Part of this is that we are increasingly in self-selected communities of people just like us. Prior to the Internet and social media, you more often interacted with people that all you had in common with was spatial location and a dash of socio-economic status. It wasn't an unbiased slice of the populace, but it was at least less biased.
But today, it's much easier to have all of your social interactions limited to a social media bubble that reflects yourself.
That in turn makes it really easy to believe that whatever is true for you must be true for everyone because it seems to be largely true for all the people you see on a daily basis.
Well i mean,,,
plenty of people are shopping online and in fact they are using the same services that this company provides to them. That is why this type of targeting is affective. Society has grown to a large customer base that is simply what they are everything is for sale. This makes the point that to sell a computer these days they have to imaging you are using it to shop, based on statistics that sad truth usually lies in numbers. How many hours a day is an average American looking for deals or the hottest thing out right now. Newer products are not event glamouring the specs of their devices it simply what you can do with them now that sets them apart from their competitor. Smartphones ads are mostly focused on the camera capabilities and the screen clarity, that is what today's average user is focused on along with how long in a day they can enjoy this new smartphone (battery). What worries me is how invested in the AI idea these companies are. You can see the great deal of hope they're emphasizing on.Not sure if this will last, but time will tell.
I think CEOs are so drunk on the shareholder buzz for AI that they think this is also what the customer wants. I love integrating AI into products, but only in a way that is seamless. For example, I did my taxes recently and there was a button to upload my tax pdfs to do a best effort auto-fill of some forms on the tax website. No mention of AI even though AI was almost certainly used for that button, just a simple plain button.
Also product managers. Google has a chromebook brand that will a strong. It feels like someone split off the hardware and software under a different brand to get a promotion...
Funny, clothes shopping is actually my favorite personal use of AI.
A while back I was driven nearly insane because I discovered that 90% of hiking pants don't have a rear left pocket. Some clothing designers have some specific vendetta against it that I just cannot figure out. As a user of said pocket who wanted to buy compatible hiking pants instead of changing my pocket usage habits, I wasted hours looking at photos and browsing physical stores to no avail. In the end I just surrendered and let $Skynet suggest some for me, which it happily did immediately.
I don't know which universe you hail from where Google Search would give that information prior to LLMs, but I don't think I came from that timeline.
But if your claim is that no one needs specific hardware to do that instead of just pulling up $Skynet.com, then I completely agree.
Google is desperately trying to find their place in this brave new world, where the only thing they make well is hosting other people's VMs and LLMs. It is so sad. It was their labs that invented the transformer, yet they failed to capitalize on it. Sure, many people are in a position to have to use Gemini via APIs, myself including, and not happy about it... because it is dirt cheap compared to most all, but still this is not what I would call AI-era domination or even stable presence.
Meanwhile Microsoft and Amazon is eating their cake with Azure and AWS. A whole new generation of smart kids is now starting their day with ChatGPT (not me, I do Claude, but same point), instead of Google... so for many people it is not Facebook nor Google Search where "the internet starts from". This is massive loss. Broadcom is probably going to eat at their push for in-house TPUs. And surely Apple already ate everyone's cake on the affordable laptop with Neo, which is incredible for Apple to do, as they've always been roughly 1.5 the price of windows competitors. And Apple did it years after Google forayed into Chromebook, which this Gemini Laptop basically is version 2.0 of. The moment ads start showing intertwined with GPT output, Google is roast, most their revenue is ad-based, no matter the very strong (and perhaps top) cloud tier and Android licenses. Regarding this - Fuchsia is still not used in any frontier product, and poor Android is so much Java-tied, that it basically lives in the 90s from in a certain sense.
We can only speculate what the reason for this all is, but I'll put a very unpopular bet on Google shrinking massively the next few years into something aggressively robotized which looks more an utility company, than a SOTA research camp. For what is worth IBM was clairvoyant enough to do this shrinking years ago, and now can brave for thousands of COBOL lines being rewritten, and then some layoffs. But IBM has evolved an ecosystem that keeps companies locked in many dimensions, similar to Oracle perhaps, while Google does not.
I wonder what's with the moonshots side of the business of Google and could they scale that.
They are still very strong in versatile r&d. And AI would open many new opportunities.
> The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
You may be the wrong gender to market this to, but giant numbers of shops and the space in those shops are devoted to one half of the population in general really liking buying clothes. Going shopping is a leisure activity. Retail therapy is a common phrase.
I also think it's not a great, world-changing, google-scale idea, but I'm probably the same gender as you.
"Going shopping" - exactly. That is a social activity with the primary goal of hanging out in a shop and having a good time. You don't do that at home in front of a laptop. This is a total misunderstanding of what "shopping" fundamentally is about.
Shopping on TikTok is a thing. That said, nobody is going to buy a laptop for buying clothes.
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> This is why AI doesn't sell
My friend just bought a Pixel instead of an iPhone because it had better AI voice chat integration, he's non-technical and has been on iPhone as long as I remember
The Google voice chat integration in android auto is vile currently. You ask it to map something. The map spins up and adds the address quickly. Shortly thereafter, the Gemini agent asks you if you want it to plot the directions? And then it starts bothering you with extra questions like "want me to tell you the weather for your destination or figure out some fun activities?". No, leave me alone and do your job better, please.
It then gets snippy when you tell it to f** off. I'm not likely to use it until they fix that.
Gemini is the worst bot. It's reprehensibly bad.
I was getting more-consistent, useful responses from the then-new voice-operated modes in Android 2.0, ~16 years ago.
Even the paid version, which is included with my Workspace account, is awful. Every time I've tried to use it for something it has lied to me and then immediately followed that lie with a bullshit follow-up question.
Using it makes me feel angry. I don't like feeling that way.
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Sometimes I feel like there's no huge tech companies left* that remember: you're supposed to convince me to give you my money. I'm not just going to do it because you used the right trendy buzzwords.
*except maybe Valve.
Wtf. I use OpenAI for all my shopping now. How to match clothing and finding things I have seen.
ChatGPT has helped me with all the wired social things I have no clue about. Like how long should a suit jacket be, what to pair with loafers. And more often than not I buy the things ChatGPT suggest.
ChatGPT lets me be normal.
I shop for things with AI as well. For example for haircare, or skincare, there is no way to figure out what ingredients are fine in various products. I pulled down 600 shampoos, prices and their ingredients, and made the AI choose which one based on my hair type and what I want.
I have another pipeline that pulls down all the groceries from stores every week in a 3km-radius and then builds cheap, healthy recipes from them, then orders the things I need by how the stores are laid out.
In general I spend about 65% of what I used to, so I think that the incentives for consumers are there.
I thought similarly, until I actually tried using AI to shop for clothes, now I’m a total convert. It’s like the best possible men’s fashion concierge…
Enjoy it while it lasts.
The pressure to turn on the money faucet is very real, and as soon as they do, the AI shopping experiences are going to just mean “run an auction and steer the user to the highest bidder”. Like how Amazon, google, etc all have been doing it for ages. It’s way too profitable for them to ignore.
As long as the trillion-dollar machine can continue to provide useful male fashion advice, then I don't really care if there's a bidding war over my attention going on behind the scenes.
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Regretfully, search engines and SEO astroturfing have become so bad that one is often forced to rely on AI to sort through online storefronts. I've had to resort to this for several recent purchasing decisions, as web searches didn't reliably surface the options (nor surfaced trustworthy information/reviews)
I use AI to research different options when buying. Eg, I used Google Search AI Mode to search for specific t-shirts with specific attributes. And I found what I was looking for and bought it.
Thanks to AI I did not have to parse through a lot of different vendors and different webpages manually.
I think this is probably the wrong group to say people don’t use AI for shopping. Even if only 10% of the world uses AI for shopping, you’d likely find 8% of them active in this group.
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist.
Really? I must be hallucinating the multiple people I know who do this here in Portugal. Clothes, random parts for stuff they need. They just point a camera and ask for it, often iterating. They clearly prefer the chat interface that somewhat also limits their choice, instead of the plethora of ad-filled websites that are hard to navigate. I'm aware this poses several problems we will need to solve, but it's still happening.
Related: Bar some of my somewhat AI-resistant friends and some older relatives, almost everyone I know (including college students I teach to, my dad, friends, non-tech co-workers...) no longer uses google as their first choice (they do fallback to it if they need to). They all use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Used to be just ChatGPT but now there's a relatively equal divide. And an ever-increasing number of them are clearly using AI for pretty much everything else (proof-reading, writing e-mails, building spreadsheets, tiny custom apps for themselves, creating music, images, jokes, memes, photo editing/touch-ups, student evaluation, school material preparation/creation, personal/intimate advice, and much, much more.)
It is especially fascinating to note that, with the exception of AI-assisted coding, there is clearly more AI usage among the non-tech folks, as so many tech people are immensely resistant to using AI for something other than work. It's clearly shifting, though, as I see more and more of those AI-resistant people slowly also using it in their daily lives, as opposed to "only for work".
Only hackernews commenters know how to market AI, but they are too good to work for a trillion dollar corp
Well a number of people here work at those corporations.
It's like Meta advertising their AR glasses with it annotating prices over fruit at the grocery store - like why are you trying to sell me on some made up use case that doesn't even exist?
How is it getting that pricing data? By reading the giant, three-inch-high price labels that are right next to the fruit?
Call me crazy but I don't think that "discovering how much oranges cost" is a big enough pain point for most people to spend hundreds of dollars on smart glasses to solve.
Google: site:apple.com "Apple Intelligence"
303 results including https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
"Apple Intelligence AI for the rest of us."
Modern day's "think different".
Your ingroup is other people's outgroup, come join us, we are cool and different.
I know plenty of friends into fashion that use and want to use AI features to find fashion, design looks for themselves, etc.
I know this game is 13 years old but had non-gamer friends who are into fashion get addicted to the Covet Fashion game.
Personally I want to use AI for fashion shopping, it just currently sucks. I want to be able to search for very specific things. Example: "women's button down collared shirt with thin vertical red and white stripes and a floral inside collar lining"
gets me a few close results but also gets thick lines, wrong colors, and not a single one actually matched the description.
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist
so out of touch lol. Had an ex-partner (complete non-computer person, working in branding & communications) who was doing that three years ago.
> seriously go check out apple.com
First words "Now Supercharged by M5, [LEARN MORE?]"
*M5* AI in the fast lane. MacBook Air delivers blazing‑fast AI performance thanks to the powerful combination of the GPU, Neural Engine, and unified memory in M5. With a Neural Accelerator built into each GPU core, AI tasks run with amazing efficiency. From AI image upscaling to running the latest large language models, you’ll be more productive and creative than ever.
Re: Apple. I don't get what you mean? https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ still exists. Were you referring to the home page only?
> No one is doing that
It's crazy how confident that sounded. I'd bet that energy would have been better spent on asking people instead of assuming that a subjective opinion is representative for anything.
As for the fact that corps like Apple backing out of AI marketing, it is because AI itself becomes a negatively connotated term that is no more associated with something great and pleasant - but has become a negaive term people associate with fear of job loss, uncertain future, high computer + RAM prices, rising retail electricity prices, AI slop spam etc etc. We basically approaching AI fatigue to the point of AI hatred - and you do no want to raise those feeling and have them associated with your brand. Apple gets that, others will follow suit.
This has btw. nothing to do wheter or not AI does actually have positive impact on society or not - it is the feelings that matter, not objective facts.
I shop with AI recently because it gave you more accurate recommendation.
> The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
I can only imagine the fashion horrors created by AI sycophancy. That said, most "fashion" is already a horror show.
In the mid 90s, one of the main use cases advertised for the Web was sharing recipes. I didn't know anyone who primarily searched for recipes online, clearly those ads were targeted at a different demographic group.
> Everything is an ad for an ad at this point.
Always has been. What do you think pays for all the “free” stuff on the internet?
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist.
"I don't personally know enough people doing what a mega-corporation with a massive market research team with multiple layers of market research audits has concluded people claims to want, so I'm just going to diss the product"
I agree with you but you are missing the fact that a lot of people are shopping with ai.
My wife in fact just presented me with a spreadsheet generated by Claude of the jewelry she’d like to have.
So yes. I expect a lot of people will use ai to shop.
yeah, any of the AI bots are bad at helping me find clothes b/c they don't even consider my size, gender, or anything when suggesting things after like 3 back and forth messages (this is both ChatGPT and Claude).
I went to the apple.com homepage, literally zero mentions of Apple Intelligence, just a dropdown option under iPhone's menu items.
I feel like "find me the shirt from the Instagram post" (which is what's depicted in the ad) is a use case that most people will love.
I know my comment is not useful, but this scenario makes me ill. We have been taught to consume. Forced to consume. Reminds me of that Monty Python skit. "It's only wafer thin." And then we explode. https://youtu.be/MFQuP-DSmGo
Every single Apple product page for a product that supports it mentions Apple Intelligence. You’re wrong.
Yes, I checked the page for Macbook Neo and there's a section called Built for Apple Intelligence. Seems like it's still there.
You are just misunderstanding the job that it is doing.
It is not "shopping for clothes with AI". It is recreating the dressing room experience from home, and it likely will be a table stakes for online shopping in the near future.
It's a formula for disgruntled customers who thought it would look ok because AI and then you won't be able to return it.
I shop for clothes with ai
>not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
This is probably because they know it is not very good.
Marketing isnt marketing in the traditional sense any more, it’s just deceptive stuff to make you buy more
HN is not the target market.
In fact, if HN hates it, there is a higher chance the product will be successful
Will Bookmark it so that it becomes one of those legendary HN quotes
I look forward to the results. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
I don't think you need to wait long. Most of your post is already proven wrong in this very thread.
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Historically the Chromebook target market is students, where this AI will probably be disabled by the school.
Unless these things are much cheaper than a Macbook Neo, I don't see it succeeding.
> The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI. No one is doing that, these people don't exist.
Lol. You're really out of touch, aren't you.
That being said, I don't know if people shop with AI would need a laptop for this... what they showed in the ad looks perfectly doable on an iPad. Perhaps this is Google's iPad attempt?
You know what they say: there are only two industries now, fraud and gambling.
I used AI to shop for shops of clothes. But I would probably use it directly if I trusted it to give me good results.
Many people are slowly realizing that AI are the fancy letters this corporations tack on to increase their prices or make it seem better then what is it. Does not improve the experience or anything
I use claude to quickly find products nearly everyday. Mainly as a powerful web search.
Really? I extensively use AI for shopping recommendations now, down to 3d printer filament, I don't touch sites like Wirecutter.
I was even at a shoe store the other day and just took a pic of a whole shelf full of sneakers and asked claude to explain them for my use case (running vs tennis).
It combines research with a buying decision, which most eCommerce sites don't currently do (except for just listing hundreds of reviews)
I dont think you are right. In the near future every purchase and every offer request will go through AI. I imagine you request 1000 offers from similar companies for your product wish. No longer do I need to spend 1 week searching for a good priced painter for my house. My AI does it. Same for all other products. At the same time, companies at the other side need to adapt to this situation and have to use AI to handle the massive amount of requests. Requests can be a real offer. But also crawl results from AIs. The circle is complete. Google wins.
There’s no way this scenario doesn’t get wall gardened off in some sort of way - as the AI SEO market will decimate current AI results in the next 3 to 6 months for sure. The slop is already making organic product hunting impossible.
I asked an LLM to research some clothing options just yesterday and it's done a great job putting together a list of brands and models with the specific parameters I wanted, very quickly.
Apple Intelligence is Gemini at this point.
Fwiw Amazon Fashion is a huge business.
Google's product managers live on another planet. Whole Google Stadia fiasco comes to mind. Imagine the claims - real time 4k 60fps gaming over Internet. Went through acquiring game studios. Designed their own controller. A year later - nothing.
Went through acquiring game studios. Closed them before they released a single game.
A big part of Stadia failing was it didn't get traction, and a big part of that reason was Google's history of just giving up on products out of nowhere, so very few people were willing to give Stadia money with the risk of everything they bought vanishing. Then, when Google did give up on Stadia out of nowhere, Google said they'd refund everyone everything they spent - the kind of pledge that might have encouraged more people to actually give it a try.
Then again I heard anecdotal stories from a lot of developers that Google was a pain in the ass to work with because they didn't understand anything about working with game studios; it was just "we'll give you X money to bring your game to Stadia" when that money didn't make it worth taking developers away from the platforms they were already publishing to.
Experience of playing games on the cloud is just not good and that's why it failed, anything else is cope.
"This is why AI doesn't sell."
There are several AI companies now with billions in yearly revenue that didn't even exist a few years ago. Many more with many millions in revenue. Saying AI doesn't sell is completely delusional. You're in an anti-AI bubble.
tell me more about how all this revenue makes up for their lack of profit. economics 101.
Whether or not they are making a profit yet is a different question from whether they sell. The amount of revenue and growth clearly shows they sell. It remains to be seen if they end up like airlines - an industry providing enormous value, with the airlines themselves capturing only a fraction of that value.
Are any of them profitable?
I suppose you said "AI Company", and not "AI Provider", but AFAIK there are none of the latter that are turning a profit.
I don’t mean to be snide, but go touch grass.
Regular people will use AI for everyday things, not writing code and managing Asana boards
Regular people don't use AI, majority of people don't like it. You're in a bubble.
Chatgpt has like a billion weekly active users
Are my 70 year old parents regular people? They've never had tech jobs, and they figured out how to use AI once I installed ChatGPT on their phone. They provide it pictures, talk to it, and also use text input.
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and why Apple has nearly wiped it off their site all together, seriously go check out apple.com, not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
Which is weird because Apple Intelligence + Shortcuts is the most underhyped corporate use case for AI. For my money, it’s the quickest and easiest method a non-programmer can use to prompt-build a program that both works and that they can understand.
Reminds me of all those facebook portal ads (was that the name?) showing kids talking to their grandparents all excited, or those ads where people point their phone at a thing (I think it's for Gemini?) and it pulls up the item to buy. I've literally never seen someone do that, and I have some insufferably-obsessed-with-AI people in my life who try to use it for everything.
Yeah anecdotal, but it just doesn't strike me as how people shop.
> At this point I'm convinced that marketing has been completely taken over by shareholder shills, marketing to customers they wish they had instead of the real customers that exist.
A bit of a tangent here, but the tldr is that I think this has been the case for quite a while.
I don't have any stats to back this up, and maybe someone does and will prove me wrong, but marketing doesnt feel significantly more effective than it was, say, 50 years ago, and yet the main reason every scrap of data about our personal lives is harvested is supposedly for marketing. Maybe it turns out theres just not that much you can do with the data, I'd certainly hope so, but I think a lot of it is just down to the fact that marketing execs don't actually use the data in any meaningful way, like you say marketing to customers they wish they had to buy the idea they were gonna do either way.
Like I remember a decade or so ago, the promise/warning was that advertising and entertainment would seamlessly blend when it can be tailored to exactly you, to the point where people happily and willingly watch advertisements. We got the opposite, adblockers are extremely common, companies have to strong arm you into even looking at their ads, and people count down the seconds until they can press the skip button
I for totally agree with you. I actually think the people disagreeing with you are just exceptions that prove the rule. You are right, nobody is really asking for this. Now, we can't say literally "0%" but what this prove, and we all sort of know, there are a lot of neurotic people out there. But, yes, this is just slop for the vast majority of people.
Theres a similar ad fod chatgpt that is on YouTube and it totally baffles me. It shows a guy lifting weights and then someone typing into chatgpt "can you help me get to 40kg by Xmas" and fhen he goes back to lifting weights again.
What the hell was that?! Chatgpt didnt do anything. The person that made that ad should be fired for gross incompetence
I have no stake in this race but you are clearly wrong and thinking your personal datapoint of one is correct at scale.
Litterally hundreds of millions shop with AI today.
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