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Comment by Zealotux | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.

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We're racing to build hell.

A hell that’s been widely documented in fiction as well. That’s the part that’s so wild to me about this. None of this was unseen. Across every medium the extreme commercialization and general collapse of the social contract due to AI has been described and a lot of the authors have been largely prophetic.

In the US this is due to the overall failure of trust in our institutions.

No one trusts Congress or the US government to effectively regulate AI for the greater good of the population. Each party believes regulations proposed by the other party will be used to discriminate against and control their party.

We have been since we bound consumption to the internet. All of this was inevitable after that.

Clothes are a good example of what ails online shopping. When you physically visit a clothing store, you chose it knowing the quality and style of that merchant -- you thereby filter out a huge fraction of the market that you want to exclude from your search.

But online (because the available search criteria are so imprecise) your search brings up every possible form of clothing, especially the stuff that's a commodity (or hyped by major e-merchants) -- cheap, popular with 25 year olds, colorless, largely disposable. It's hopeless unless you yourself are a commodity -- indiscriminating, predictable, and totally average.

full disclosure I work at Whatnot but that sort of thing is a large part of the appeal of Whatnot to me, that people are showing off the stuff live on stream and you can ask questions about it

AI is in spitting distance of being able to do that too.

I sometimes wonder if the random people sitting there hawking a pile of Amazon goods that pops up after every Amazon purchase are already AI.

This sounds like a really unpleasant shopping experience to me.

This whole concept of selling things in video format seems so alien to me. I didn't believe when someone told me they shop on TikTok now. It already takes me ages to browse through a gallery of items, I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.

I’ve been car shopping recently, and I’ve found myself deliberately seeking out videos, because I’ve found that it’s very hard to get a sense of what the thing is really going to look like from static photos. Unstaged photos make everything look uglier, staged photos require adjusting for the unknown staging.

Oh, I definitely look up products I intend to buy on YouTube. But I don't go there (or any other video platform) to discover them.

that's more or less how I felt about it, but someone I know worked at Whatnot and liked working there so I tried out the app before applying and then applied because the product clicked for me. I wouldn't have joined Whatnot if I didn't like the product.

> I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.

That's fair, it's just not how people use it and it's not the concept. It's primarily a browse experience, not a search experience. You can search but that's not the core experience.

I buy vinyl records and retro games. There are sellers that I like. When I open the app I see which of my preferred sellers are live and I tune into their stream and hang out and watch them. If something I'm interested in pops up, I'll bid on it. Live shopping is not trying to be "ebay but video", it's a different experience.

The digital Yellow Pages were replaced by streaming teleshopping.

Some people watch TV channels which do nothing but present things to buy with a phone number to order. Lots of live shows as well, its not just non-stop pre-recorded infomercials. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest such an idea would move to short form video content as well. People trying on makeup or showing off clothing with their affiliate links down below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSN

I applied there but the gamified, urgent dynamic of the shopping experience rubs me the wrong way, it's stacked against the user

It's threatening to "unwind" the entire digital sector back to 1990. Online shopping damaged, job interviews done in person, essays by hand, exams proctored. Cover letters obsolete. There could be a "cognitive waterline" effect where older people who can't tell will continue living in an AI-generated bubble. Cover letters already are generated on demand specifically because people still claim to require them, even though we know they're not real anymore.

Could be an advantage to knowing this because you can step around it.

_You_ know it's AI, so you go in person to a store. Likewise, next time you hire, you can simply refuse to accept "cover letters".

I still write my cover letters myself. :( Though I do refine them with LLMs, but instruct to retain the tone and the feel of the writing.

From what I'm following the GenZ and GenA crowd, there are specific subcultures who are moving more to local stuff. DVDs, "cyberdecks", actual mp3 players with no streaming, Plex/Jellyfin setups, etc...

The world is, at least partially, healing.

This was my experience as well trying to buy a charger. You can't trust anything. For brands that have their own store, some have such a bad experience that it's easier and less stressful to go to the store and buy directly from there.

I do woodworking for a hobby and wanted to find a nice "intro to routers" article. After skimming past the obvious SEO crap on google I clicked the first likely-seeming link and was greeted by an AI slop image of two misshapen routers being operated by three disembodied hands with seventeen fingers each. I immediately threw my laptop out the window, watched it shatter into five hundred pieces, walked across the street to the library, and checked out a goddamn book.

I was already getting disillusioned with the Internet as a learning resource during the SEO spam era, but the AI era has completely destroyed it.

For questions like this you can ask an AI directly instead of getting herded through the clickbait.

Education and targeted summary searches are one of the best uses. I literally found the location of the criminal who embezzled thousands of euros from my condominium with an AI search. It took me around fifteen minutes. Other people had been looking for years. (True story...)

The thing with LLMs is that it is very, very easy to adjust the weights across the entire model to sway responses one way or another. Previously, in the hypothetical case one wanted to rewrite history, it would be a much more involved endeavour of curation; fabrication of original sources would be difficult to do at scale. But now it's trivial for a provider to inject a preamble to the prompt to not only hide results that do not fit the narrative of those legislating in the model providers' favour, but to distort the results.

Obviously none of that is happening in the current moment, and I grant that cake recipes would be low stakes, but I would rather take the tradeoff of trawling through a little bit of slop to get that same information than acclimate myself to a workflow that could be abused by providers in more high-stakes situations down the line.

But that's just me, and I realise this is not a particularly popular take, but it should nonetheless be illustrative for why "just ask the LLM" might not be the best of ideas long term.

No way in hell I'm trusting AI for something that could lose me a finger.

Then it turns out that the book was written by an LLM.

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