Amazon will show images of AI products when you search for a reason

In what may be one of the most questionable uses of artificial intelligence yet, Amazon announced on Wednesday that it will display AI-generated product images within its shopping app based on users’ search queries. That’s right – the retailer where people shop for real-world products believes that displaying fake images will “help” consumers find what they’re looking for better.

Enough already.

Here’s how Amazon does he says in a blog post That feature will work. Clients may have something in mind but don’t know the right term to describe it in a way that produces useful results. (Examples Amazon gives are things like “hoodie neck” for T-shirt style or “rattan” for furniture.)

When someone enters a search query, they’ll see a variety of AI-generated product images below the autocomplete suggestions. (See photo above.)

For example, if you search for a blue cotton dress, you might see a few dress styles — short or long sleeves, different lengths, and other variations — appear as visual options. The idea is that clicking on one will direct you to search results that best match that pattern, powered by Amazon’s visual search capabilities.

In fact, it’s fairly easy for a retailer to fabricate counterfeit products as a way to direct users to search results.

For starters, it’s potentially misleading — customers who don’t read carefully might think they’re directed to a page where they can find that exact dress, and then be disappointed when it’s not available. And there’s a fairly obvious question as to why you would create product images when you have a website full of real photos of real products – which is what the online shopper actually wants to see.

This feature comes on the heels of a number of other attempts by Amazon to integrate artificial intelligence into its retail site and shopping app, with mixed results. On the more helpful side, Amazon actually does Summarizes customer reviews via AI, so you don’t have to read them all to learn about the main pros and cons of the product. What’s even more surprising is that it was introduced last year Short summary of the audio product A feature in which AI experts describe the most important features of the product, podcast style.

Other recent AI features include AI-generated “shopping groups” to direct people to curated pages dedicated to a specific fashion style; Amazon Lens Livewhich scans products in the camera view to find visual matches; Ability to add text to visual searches; And a visual lock screen search tool for iOS.

Earlier this month, Amazon also Replaced Rufus AI chatbot with Alexa for shopping To enable natural language shopping queries via voice and text.