The real problem is that the entity providing search, be that Google or Amazon, are NOT interested in showing you exactly what you want. They’re interested in showing you stuff that might be kinda similar sorta to what you want. And a whole lot more besides.
Their search system serves their purposes just fine. It gets people in general to buy stuff they never knew they wanted.
As in the example just above, we’d like “plus size skirt” to be interpreted as “skirts (and only skirts) that are available in plus sizes.” They want to interpret it as “skirts or any other clothes in any size, including plus.” They might make the connection from “skirt” to “clothes for females of whatever age”, but probably not.
We aren’t the customer here. We’re the product. Which is a f***-ed up way to run an economy.
I think this is more applicable to selling information to third parties about our behavior.
Here it seems more straightforward - there is no ulterior motive beyond selling you as much stuff as possible. I think here you could argue that what’s going on is that sometimes we don’t know what we want, and vendors respond to what we demonstrate with our actions that we actually want, even if we claim to want something else! Of course that’s not always true, and I think it just tends to stick in our memory when we did want a very specific thing and the vendor algorithm tried to second-guess us.
This is a variation IMO of tragedy of the commons. We collectively get the behavior we collectively reward. Even if that means the dumbest or least forethoughtful 90% of us set the agenda for the remaining 10% who’re like us here on the Dope: the smartest, hippest people on the planet, plus a few total dipsticks.
If we all refused to look at “Stuff other people bought along with this” results, they’d stop showing it to us because it would stop working. But as you said upthread, 35% of Amazon’s sales come from links to products the customer was almost certainly not wanting until they were shown it. And they dutifully not only followed the teaser links, but clicked “buy”.
We can’t win the fight against our AI and commercial overlords when we have so many clueless traitors in our midst.
Well, the other way of looking at this is that we cannot on the one hand complain about Google and Amazon collecting personalized data about our individual vastly superior enlightened shopping habits, and then complain that their algorithms treat us as though we were just any ignorant pleb.
I just wish I could pay them $10/year or whatever they don’t make off my non-clicks to treat me as both a) utterly anonymous, and b) bright enough to be able to ask for what I want, so give me exactly that and nothing more.
Back in the day of dead tree newspapers I often said I’d gladly pay extra for a daily newspaper with zero advertising in it. It’d be tiny, more ecologically sound, and I could read it without useless distractions.
Yeah, I was astonished by the report that 35% of Amazon’s retail sales come from the Amazon AI recommendations. The scary thing about that is how much that implies they can expect to make from advertising when it’s all that good. Which in turn implies that any “ad free” option for anything in the future will probably be priced a lot higher than we expect.
In a brick an mortar store, you see all the products on display as you walk around. You might walk into Kohl’s or wherever with the intent of just buying a midi skirts with pockets, and on the way to the section where the skirts are you walk past a rack of shirts marked 50% off. Maybe you have good impulse control, but at least some portion of customers will decided to pick up a shirt or two while they’re there, or some other items they weren’t planning on buying before they came to the store.
The “problem” from the perspective on an online store is how to replicate that experience on a website. If you can just go straight to the thing you’re looking for without seeing any other products, you won’t make those impulse buys you would in a brick and mortar store. Amazon solved that “problem” by doing the things people are discussing in this thread – the AI recommendations, and search results that show you a bunch of things that are only slightly related to your search.
which begs the Q: are those 35% ON TOP of the “searched purchases” or INSTEAD of them?
I assume they are smart enough to sell you up with their recommendations, but if I search for $50,-trousers and end up purchasing $5,- socks instead that might not be too hot a deal for them …
OTOH its the bald guy flying into space and not me - so there’s that
true that - that is kindalike why mechanical stairs in malls never “line up” … they always make you walk around a plaza to maximize your exposure to the vile capitalistic products
I would guess all that it’s saying is that 35% of sales start with someone clicking on something the AI recommended. I think they are only talking about the stuff that the AI recommends tangentially, not the direct returns from a search that you initiate.
But you make a good point, even if these appear to be extra sales, you can’t be sure of that unless you to a properly controlled trial with and without the AI.
On the subject of Amazon’s “recommended” items – I don’t think I’ve ever bought something just because Amazon’s AI recommended it, but maybe I have and just don’t remember. But since my birthday is coming up in about 2 months, I’ve been updating my Amazon wish list recently. And that’s caused them to generate some interesting recommendations. And some of those recommendations make me think “Well that’s something I’d kind of like to have. I wouldn’t buy it for myself, but I wouldn’t mind if someone else were to buy it for me as a gift.” So then I add the recommended item to my wish list, too.