this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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I don't know why you want to use an AI to purchase goods and learn about products. That's what the current www is really really strong at. Lots of people are spending an awful lot of money to make that information really easy to discover, and popular search engines definitely prioritise that information.
Also, if an AI is to give you price and product information it's going to have to be reading live web pages, which will of course be full of ads. SEO will become AIO/LLMO. There is no end to the time and money advertisers are prepared to pour into getting products in front of users. The irony is that you seem to want to view products and you have this weird perspective where you're keen to avoid ads for products so that you can view marketing information about products without the ads.
It's already fairly hard to tell without knowing some good websites or reading through to conclusions and using some common sense whether a review website is honest or biased. I don't know why you think an AI with access to the Internet will filter out fake reviews and content crafted to lead you to specific products over others.
Also, downloading and configuring your own AI is unlikely to be the way the "AI revolution" comes. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and other mega corporations will be funding the "AI revolution" and will not sit idly by allowing their kingdoms to crumble.
The number of people who will be saved from the corporations that run the online world by open source grass roots AI will be smaller than the number of people who are saved by Linux from proprietory products and SAAS.
Yeah, everyone will get used to using an AI to interact with the web, but it will be freely supplied by a corporation, and I PROMISE you the enshitification of AI has been long planned before we even reach step one of making it awesome for the masses.
You know that a LLM is a statistical word prediction thing, no? That LLMs "hallucinate". That this is an inevitable consequence of how they work. They're designed to take in a context and then sound human, or sound formal, or sound like an excellent programmer, or sound like a lawyer, but there's no particular reason why the content that they present to you would be accurate. It's just that their training data contains an awful lot of accurate data which has a surprisingly large amount of commonality of meaning.
You say that the current crop of LLMs are good at Wikipedia style questions, but that's because their authors have trained them with some of the most reliable and easy to verify information on the Web. A lot of that is Wikipedia style stuff. That's it's core knowledge, what it grew up reading, the yardstick by which it was judged. And yet it still goes off on inaccurate tangents because there's nothing inherently accurate about statistically predicting the next word based on your training and the context and content of the prompt.
Yes, LLMs sound like they understand your prompt and are very knowledgeable, but the output is fundamentally not a fact-based thing, it's a synthesized thing, engineered to sound like its training data.
Well, sounds like you're well on your way to hand-rolling your own product comparison tool that's Powered By AI TM. You could make a popular price comparison site that initially filters out all that cruft and just gives you simple, clear, easy to read information about products.
Version 2 could have handy links to the cheapest websites.
Once it gets super popular you could offer retailers the chance to ensure their products and prices are correct. Perhaps a nice easy AI powered upload where you dump the info on whatever format you like, check it's understood and go live.
You could later offer retailers the chance to host a store front with you, or maybe allow initially just one or two, very tasteful, clearly marked-as-advertisment links for strictly AI-sanctioned relevant upselling, you know, offer the warranty with the product, or the printer with the fancier ink alongside the ones that exactly matched the criteria.
Once your engagement with retailers is strong, and they know they'll be missing out on a lot of custom, you can start maximising your income from them.
Or, wait did this whole cycle repeat itself many times over with many websites and many corporations?
Enshitification is real, and it's already AI powered. We don't know exactly why what's in front of us when we're online is the thing that is most likely to get us to keep scrolling and clicking and purchasing and maximising profits, but it's reasonable to assume that on a lot of successful websites, some sort of AI system chose it for exactly those purposes.
It's nice that you feel AI will get us away from the power of the multinational corporations, but I think it's vastly more likely that the AI we use will fall under their control and they will be twenty steps ahead of us. They were the ones who popularised it in the first place!
(Personally, I tend to use some reviewing sites that I trust and in particular for phones, a spec agreggator so I can filter out the five year old products that amazon is offering me.)