I use AI to do all my holiday shopping

In their initial responses, ChatGPT did not provide any links to the products. But it provided them easily when I asked, and while I didn’t click on all of them, none seemed to be hallucinations. Claude, on the other hand, apologized and said that he “can’t really link directly to websites or products”. Anthropic has yet to release a web search feature for Claude, but the company says it’s working on it.

That technically made Claude the least useful chatbot I’ve tried for shopping. But it also means that Anthropic has so far avoided wading into the ethically murky territory of allowing its AI chatbots to scrape human-written product reviews from the web. Instead, Claude bases its product comparisons on its existing data set. Perplexity, on the other hand, says that thanks to Buy with Pro, people “no longer have to scroll through countless product reviews.”

When I asked Perplexity what I should get for my editor/musician friend, he recommended a set of solar bike lights (I also noted that he was a cyclist). It wasn’t a bad idea, but not exactly a worthy birthday present. I kept adjusting my prompt. How about a custom leather guitar strap? Down the rabbit hole I went.

The goal of Perplexity in hyping up its shopping features, I was beginning to understand, was not only to help me brainstorm fresh ideas or come up with supremely thoughtful gifts. Perplexity is playing the long game, slowly siphoning our attention away from competing corners of the web, gaining a better understanding of how people like me use their platform, and feeding that data into their ever-changing AI models. in evolution. Whenever I needed to refine my searches because the initial results were often missing, I signed into the Perplexity app, which meant I wasn’t on Amazon and not on Google (although I ended up on both sites eventually) . Perplexity Pro is not a full ecommerce site, nor an “agent” in any real sense, but I am one of millions of people who provide the information necessary to become these things.

When I returned to Google Gemini, I found that the gifts I suggested for my 16-year-old niece were not bad, per se, just not creative and, in one case, confusing. She said she should buy a “cat blanket for snuggling up with a good book,” but it wasn’t clear if the blanket was for her or her cat. A Kindle was a great idea. But I’m scared of what he would write me if I sent him the SAT prep book that Gemini suggested (probably “thx”, and nothing else). The app ideas for my editor/musician friend were equally uninspired, among them “Vinyl records” and “High quality headphones”.

I used the year version of Geminibut earlier this month, Google began rolling out a newer version, Gemini 2.0, to developers and limited testers. The new AI model “will think several steps ahead, and act for you”, the company. he says. For now, that means taking action on behalf of developers — running the next step in their coding workflows — but I’m eagerly awaiting the day I can tick off my shopping list.

ChatGPT eventually led me to an online grocery store where I bought a few specialty baking ingredients for my friend, who at this point, had built up in my mind to be a finalist in The Great British Bake-Off. In the end, I talked to the AI ​​bots for so long that many of the gifts I chose wouldn’t arrive until Christmas. My niece will receive money in a card. My search for a friend’s birthday present was inconclusive. I decided to throw the task on the road until January, a month full of news and agency resolution.