7 ms·

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

• Forgeties79 5mo ago
  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.
• engeljohnb 5mo ago
  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.
• parl_match 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • Jzush 5mo ago
    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?
    • parl_match 5mo ago
      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.
      • 9dev 5mo ago
        You probably don't even realise how far you are from average Americans, who are currently struggling to pay for their groceries. Shelling out three grand for a two-week vacation is simply unattainable for the vast majority of the population.
        • jimbokun 5mo ago
          More people travel overseas than ever before. To the extent major tourist destinations are having to take measures to limit the number of tourists coming there.
        • matwood 5mo ago
          Families pay double that or more for a week at Disney.
          • com2kid 5mo ago
            > Families pay double that or more for a week at Disney. Not anymore. Disney now targets high income earners, not the average American.
        • parl_match 5mo ago
          > You probably don't even realise how far you are from average Americans I think this is more you than me. The middle class in America is still strong. Is it weakening and eroding? That is also true. > Shelling out three grand for a two-week vacation is simply unattainable for the vast majority of the population. Would you quote me where I said it was the majority, let alone vast? Well, actually, depending on the data and who you ask, 40-60% of Americans spend $3000 a year on travel. Is 60% the majority? I'm not good at math. https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-the-day-on-average-how-much-do-americans-planning-a-summer-vacation-expect-to-spend-on-flights-and-lodging-this-year/ https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th... https://www.nerdwallet.com/travel/studies/summer-travel-report https://www.nerdwallet.com/travel/studies/summer-travel-repo... So really, you may be the one who's disconnected from reality. Not to say that things aren't getting better, I think they're getting worse. Just that you've got a bit of a doomer mindset.
  • sleepyguy 5mo ago
    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.
    • ricardonunez 5mo ago
      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
  • KalMann 5mo ago
    Are you sure? I think "normies" would prefer to see and try on the clothes they buy.
    • xboxnolifes 5mo ago
      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.
  • TacticalCoder 5mo ago
    > "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.
• robbie-c 5mo ago
  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.
  • adrithmetiqa 5mo ago
    I’m sorry but I’m not buying this argument. This problem was solved in 2005 with search engines.
    • talldan 5mo ago
      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.
  • SeanAnderson 5mo ago
    Did it work? Did you buy something?
    • robbie-c 5mo ago
      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.
      • OhMeadhbh 5mo ago
        That you didn't just search for "Big and Tall" or some-such tells me the search engines aren't as decent as I might think. Are search engines really that useless? Or did you start with a search for "clothes, tall" and then use AI to scrape the hits to find more details?
• dmix 5mo ago
  > 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
  • SecretDreams 5mo ago
    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.
    • ssl-3 5mo ago
      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.
      • SecretDreams 5mo ago
        I use Gemini pro at work and home for some LLM tasks and it's fine. Decent for coding. But the voice implementation of it and integration into Android and Android auto is such a half assed attempt that is being slammed down my throat. It's offensive. And I agree, it's a regression compared to the very old AA auto assistant for basic tasks.
        • ssl-3 5mo ago
          I haven't used it for coding. I don't get very many Gemini Pro prompts with my [very pedestrian] google workspace account. Most of those prompts are spent dealing with the the lies, and after we get that straight there isn't much left for anything resembling actual work. As a bonus feature: Because it's a workspace account, it forgets everything about what went wrong last time so every session is like a scene from the film Groundhog Day. It is apparently impossible to change this behavior even though I am the administrator. Overall, I find its utility to be negative -- I'm worse with it than I am without it. Which is remarkable, I think: I've been using ChatGPT since pretty early on in the demo days and paying for a Plus account for about as long as anyone ever could, and my opinion of that is generally positive. I've accomplished some fairly neat stuff with OpenAI's offerings that I wouldn't have been able to do on my own. So I'm not generally averse to LLMs. I'm just averse to using Gemini to do anything more complex than turning on a light bulb. :) I'm glad to hear that you're able to find some utility with it.
• canes123456 5mo ago
  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.
  • beezle 5mo ago
    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.
    • duzer65657 5mo ago
      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.
  • whackernews 5mo ago
    Goodness me, when are we just going to stop buying “products” already?
  • Marsymars 5mo ago
    For stores with strong curation, you could just skip the research phase and buy whatever Costco or Lee Valley is selling.
  • coffe2mug 5mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761821 You wrote this remember
    • canes123456 5mo ago
      I don’t get the conflict? I want ai to write code I can read and check before pushing. I also want AI to do research and present results in a way I can review and make the final decision. I don’t want AI to buy something without any way to audit its thought process or show primary source evidence. This is exactly the same as my stance for code.
• tyre 5mo ago
  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.
  • vachina 5mo ago
    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.
    • AntiUSAbah 5mo ago
      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
    • jnovek 5mo ago
      We all outsourced our spending to “robots” (via targeted ads) a decade and a half ago.
      • amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
        Nah. Ad blockers are your friend.
        • vntok 5mo ago
          Ad blockers do absolutely nothing against fake reviews, fraudulent claims, sponsored articles and influencers manipulating you into buying stuff.
    • tyre 5mo ago
      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.
• bottlepalm 5mo ago
  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?
  • danudey 5mo ago
    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.
• ai-x 5mo ago
  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
  • Jzush 5mo ago
    I look forward to the results. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
    • anthonyrstevens 5mo ago
      I don't think you need to wait long. Most of your post is already proven wrong in this very thread.
      • FridgeSeal 5mo ago
        You can’t scold them for being contrarian and wrong, and back up your point using…other comments in the thread.
  • tapoxi 5mo ago
    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.
• cromka 5mo ago
  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.
  • valicord 5mo ago
    This worked for me just a few weeks ago
    • cromka 5mo 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.
      • wasabi991011 5mo ago
        I just tried it now, it worked. Specifically, I long-pressed the home button to pull up Gemini, pressed the "+" to add screen content, and said "add this event to my Google calendar". Confirmed it worked by opening my Google calendar.
        • cromka 5mo ago
          Someone said it doesn't work anymore for Workspace accounts, which I use. It did work, though, and it wasn't communicated when it stopped.
  • rtkwe 5mo ago
    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).
• selectodude 5mo ago
  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.
  • Jzush 5mo ago
    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.
    • vntok 5mo ago
      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.
    • xboxnolifes 5mo ago
      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.
    • MiSeRyDeee 5mo ago
      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
    • AntiUSAbah 5mo ago
      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.
• zulban 5mo ago
  "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.
  • eukara 5mo ago
    tell me more about how all this revenue makes up for their lack of profit. economics 101.
    • matwood 5mo ago
      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.
    • zulban 5mo ago
      We're talking about revenue not profit. "AI doesn't sell" is nonsense. That's revenue.
      • eukara 5mo ago
        inflating the numbers on revenue is pretty easy. it's why the phrase 'revenue is vanity, profit is sanity' exists. these companies have already done it (cloud partner billings), are still doing it. how much of that is consumer spending? presumably very little, it's why they want to integrate into _existing services_ (like healthcare apps) with already existing users. it can't stand on its own. case in point: Sora > After a splashy launch, Sora’s worldwide user count peaked at around a million and then collapsed to fewer than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was burning through roughly $1 million every day — not because people loved it but because video generation is so costly to run.
  • LAC-Tech 5mo ago
    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.
• andrepd 5mo ago
  You know what they say: there are only two industries now, fraud and gambling.
• wg0 5mo ago
  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.
  • danudey 5mo ago
    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.
    • viking123 5mo ago
      Experience of playing games on the cloud is just not good and that's why it failed, anything else is cope.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• holoduke 5mo ago
  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.
  • conception 5mo ago
    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.
• sneak 5mo ago
  Every single Apple product page for a product that supports it mentions Apple Intelligence. You’re wrong.
  • duckmysick 5mo ago
    Yes, I checked the page for Macbook Neo and there's a section called Built for Apple Intelligence. Seems like it's still there.
• AntiUSAbah 5mo ago
  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)
  • krackers 5mo ago
    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.
  • xp84 5mo ago
    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.
    • AntiUSAbah 5mo ago
      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.
• littlecranky67 5mo ago
  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.
• tsunamifury 5mo ago
  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.
• numbers 5mo ago
  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.
• jorl17 5mo ago
  > 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".
• gniv 5mo ago
  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.
• jimbob45 5mo ago
  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.
• byzt 5mo ago
  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.
  • cstever 5mo ago
    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.
• killerstorm 5mo ago
  Only hackernews commenters know how to market AI, but they are too good to work for a trillion dollar corp
  • jimbokun 5mo ago
    Well a number of people here work at those corporations.
• browningstreet 5mo ago
  Fwiw Amazon Fashion is a huge business.
• vmax 5mo ago
  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.
• Salgat 5mo ago
  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.
  • fblp 5mo ago
    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...
• SunshineTheCat 5mo ago
  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.
  • munificent 5mo ago
    > 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• Jmcclain269 5mo ago
  I use claude to quickly find products nearly everyday. Mainly as a powerful web search.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• atonse 5mo ago
  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)
• clbrmbr 5mo ago
  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…
  • ninkendo 5mo ago
    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.
    • ssl-3 5mo ago
      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.
      • ninkendo 5mo ago
        A look at Amazon’s search results says it very much won’t continue to provide useful advice, no. Maybe this’ll be the first tech product category that avoids enshittification, but I’m not holding my breath.
        • ssl-3 5mo ago
          That seems like a poor forecast. I've been buying things from Amazon since they really were just a book store, and for this entire time it has seemed like their search has been Not Good. For instance: I have a small, old cast iron pan that I use to cook eggs. I wanted to buy a very small spatula (or turner, depending on vernacular) to use with it. But the harder I worked to integrate the concept of "small" into the search box, the bigger the spatulas were in the Amazon search results. It was like being in opposite-land. I ultimately gave up and bought nothing. But sure: It's absolutely possible that the fashion-oriented utility of a connected LLM will degraded from wherever it is today, and become every bit as terrible as the Amazon search box has always been. I hope that it doesn't happen, but it certainly can happen.
• bodge5000 5mo ago
  > 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
• freetime2 5mo ago
  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.
  • eukara 5mo ago
    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?
    • freetime2 5mo ago
      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.
    • Max-Limelihood 5mo ago
      Of course it will be gamed. Everything can be gamed. Like you said, search engines are also gamed; that doesn't mean I refuse to use search engines.
• mcmcmc 5mo ago
  > 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?
• fiej 5mo ago
  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.
  • exterior4052 5mo ago
    [flagged]
• nl 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • dvt 5mo ago
    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.
  • firecall 5mo ago
    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.
  • JSR_FDED 5mo ago
    > I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly) You’re on HN and know 4 females, that’s the truly interesting part :-)
  • shermanyo 5mo ago
    "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."
• dzonga 5mo ago
  [dead]
• neya 5mo ago
  > 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"
• malux85 5mo ago
  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
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• ssss11 5mo ago
  Marketing isnt marketing in the traditional sense any more, it’s just deceptive stuff to make you buy more
• nomilk 5mo ago
  > 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" :)
  • stackghost 5mo ago
    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.
    • utopiah 5mo ago
      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
  • k12sosse 5mo ago
    Have you tried learning the local language?
    • elbrian 5mo ago
      No
    • nomilk 5mo ago
      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.
• jcelerier 5mo ago
  > 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.
• hekkle 5mo 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.
• ipython 5mo ago
  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.
• websap 5mo ago
  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
  • tkel 5mo ago
    Regular people don't use AI, majority of people don't like it. You're in a bubble.
    • websap 5mo ago
      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.
      • tkel 5mo ago
        Are the majority of people who don't like / don't use AI not regular people? Definitionally, they are, more so than your parents. Funny how you try to make a general statement but immediately fall back to anecdotes when pressed.
        • websap 5mo ago
          Didn’t even need AI for this one - https://www.elon.edu/u/news/2025/03/12/survey-52-of-u-s-adults-now-use-ai-large-language-models-like-chatgpt/ https://www.elon.edu/u/news/2025/03/12/survey-52-of-u-s-adul...
    • nfw2 5mo ago
      Chatgpt has like a billion weekly active users
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• mbrumlow 5mo ago
  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.
• benced 5mo ago
  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.
  • cstever 5mo ago
    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 https://youtu.be/MFQuP-DSmGo
• rippeltippel 5mo ago
  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.
• socalgal2 5mo ago
  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.
• kermatt 5mo ago
  > 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.
• ChicknNuggt 5mo ago
  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
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• thekevan 5mo ago
  >not a single mention of Apple Intelligence. This is probably because they know it is not very good.
• Scrounger 5mo ago
  > 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 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.
  • hirako2000 5mo ago
    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-thinking.pdf 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 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24755v1
    • RugnirViking 5mo ago
      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 and what the zeitgiest was around that time. 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.
      • hirako2000 5mo ago
• wunderlotus 5mo ago
  Re: Apple. I don't get what you mean? https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ still exists. Were you referring to the home page only?
• repox 5mo ago
  > 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.
• vaulstein 5mo ago
  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.
• NicoJuicy 5mo ago
  Apple Intelligence is Gemini at this point.
• mahirsaid 5mo ago
  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.
• philipallstar 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • teiferer 5mo ago
    "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.
    • zarzavat 5mo ago
      Shopping on TikTok is a thing. That said, nobody is going to buy a laptop for buying clothes.
      • philipallstar 5mo ago
        People buy clothes online all the time.
• raincole 5mo ago
  > 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?
• augment_me 5mo ago
  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.
• invalidusernam3 5mo ago
  Google: site:apple.com "Apple Intelligence" 303 results including https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
  • thefz 5mo ago
    "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.
• chrisgen19 5mo ago
  I shop with AI recently because it gave you more accurate recommendation.
• dinkumthinkum 5mo ago
  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.
• swiftcoder 5mo ago
  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)
• larodi 5mo ago
  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.
  • petra 5mo ago
    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.
• l3x4ur1n 5mo ago
  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.
• nfw2 5mo ago
  I shop for clothes with ai
• cyberrock 5mo ago
  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.
• electrosphere 5mo ago
  I used Gemini recently to upgrade my 10-year old desktop PC. I listed my current components, budget, requirements and it walked me through different options/components etc. Gave me all kinds of tips. I committed probably ~£450 to the project and more or less trusted it. The handful of times I did a manual "spot check" of it's advice, it turned out to be good. The upgrade was a success and I'm very happy. My take away is that AI is a wonderful tool and if this "AI laptop" is optimised for that then it's a bet/product worth trying. Well done Google, I'll watch with interest.
• tristor 5mo ago
  > The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI. Shopping with AI is something I wish actually worked, but instead it doesn't. I've been using ChatGPT and Claude to try to help me cross-shop, solution/ideate, and figure out a path forward with various things: whole home dehumidification / HVAC updates, car mods, whole home water filtration systems, door locks, kitchen and office lighting updates, exercise equipment, et al. As a whole, that experience has shown me that AI tools are /okay/ (but not "good") at recommending products that I can then go research more on my own. The tools are /TERRIBLE/ at confirming fitment or really doing anything that will give me the confidence to go from "this is interesting" to checking out in a shopping cart. ChatGPT has at least gotten better at bailing out, and now mostly recommends I send an email to a vendor to confirm fitment or that I hire a professional and recommends someone in my area rather than answering my questions well. As an avid DIYer and fairly handy/competent generalists, I have no desire to hire someone to do anything unless I can't help it, I'd rather figure it out on my own but the information to do so is often lacking or hidden away. My hope was that AI tools could synthesize information from manufacturer's datasheets and install instructions which are hidden away and targeted at pros/distributors, with listing information from retail sites, to verify fitment, compatibility, and fitness for purpose, so that it could make a proper holistic recommendation. I wasn't even able to get it to give me proper torque specs for bolts on my car, but was able to find them by digging far enough in Lemon Manuals (https://lemon-manuals.la/ https://lemon-manuals.la/). On the whole, I would say AI tools are pretty shit at helping me spend my money effectively, and so are ads. It's an exceptional amount of work and time I have to invest to find the right things to buy, and I don't see any progress towards this situation getting better. I think Google is on to something with there being an addressable need, but I have no faith that Gemini and their approach will actually work and be useful. It's mostly a gimmick right now that results in poor outcomes that are only acceptable to people who lack the competence and discernment to know the difference.