I got an email from Shopify this week that my products are available in ChatGPT now:
Is this a thing people are really doing? Buying products in a hallucination-prone LLM chatbot? How does that make sense?
I honestly could see people doing this. The unfortunate truth is that people who aren’t as clued up on tech companies and their tactics are easier targets for stuff like this.
The best thing I think we can do about this is try to help the people who fall into that camp to understand how they are being manipulated.
Overwhelm. I mean I get it, shopping sites don’t reply to
“What’s the best laptop for school? Nah that’s too expensive, gimme a good tablet. Nah that’s too expensive too”
And I guess openAi themselves noticed the chat windows present on shopping sites. I don’t like how this is bringing the algorithm gambling of content platforms to shopping buuut…
Even as a techie, I can’t say that spending two weeks catching up with the new naming schemes for every part is a good time (what is a “Copilot-enabled Ultra 7”?!)
