In what may be one of the more questionable uses of AI to date, Amazon announced on Wednesday that it will display AI-generated images of products within its shopping app based on users’ search queries. That’s right — a retailer where people shop for real-world products thinks that displaying fake photos will “help” consumers better find what they’re looking for.
Enough already.
Here’s how Amazon says in a blog post that the feature will work. Customers may have something in mind but don’t know the right term to describe it in a way that returns useful results. (The examples Amazon gives are things like “cowl neck” for a style of shirts or “rattan” for furniture.)
When someone enters a search query, they’ll be shown a variety of AI-generated product images below their autocomplete suggestions. (See above photo.)
For instance, if you search for a blue gingham dress, you might see a few dress styles — short or long sleeves, varying lengths, and other differences — appear as visual options. The idea is that clicking one would direct you to search results that better match that style, powered by Amazon’s visual search capabilities.
In reality, it’s somewhat bananas for a retailer to make up fake products as a way of guiding users to search results.
For starters, it’s potentially misleading — customers who don’t read carefully may think they’re being directed to a page where they could find that exact dress, then be disappointed when it isn’t available. And there’s the fairly obvious question of why you’d make up product images when you have a website full of real photographs of real products — which is presumably what an online shopper actually wants to see.
The feature follows a number of other attempts by Amazon to integrate AI into its retail site and shopping app, with mixed results. On the more useful end, Amazon already summarizes customer reviews via AI, so you don’t have to read them all to get a sense of the key pros and cons of a product. More bizarrely, it last year rolled out a short audio product summary feature in which AI experts describe a product’s highlights, podcast-style.
Other recent AI features include AI-generated “shoppable collages” to direct people to curated pages devoted to a particular fashion style; Amazon Lens Live, which scans products in a camera’s view to find visual matches; the ability to add text to visual searches; and a Lock Screen visual search widget for iOS.
Earlier this month, Amazon also replaced its Rufus AI chatbot with Alexa for Shopping to enable natural language shopping queries via voice and text.
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