Comment by port11
7 hours ago
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-...