Amazon uses AI to invent products you can’t buy
Welcome to AI Slop Shopping
Amazon’s latest AI shopping “feature” generates fake product images while you type, because apparently searching through the world’s largest pile of actual products was too grounded in reality.
Available starting today, the Amazon app will generate images of products as you type words into the search bar. With the example of clothing, Amazon shows the AI bar generating a product that matches the user’s description, though the product pictured doesn’t actually exist.
Instead, that image is meant to be used to “find products that look like these AI images.”
Amazon explains that this is meant to bridge the gap between “imagination” and “product discovery.”
“Amazon’s newest AI-powered search experience bridges imagination with product discovery in the search bar in the Amazon Shopping app. A customer may want a shirt with a draped collar but can’t think of the term “cowl neck,” or a couch with woven side panels but doesn’t know the word “rattan.” Now, as customers search for products using descriptive language—like color, texture, or pattern—AI-generated images instantly take shape in the suggestions below the search bar, shifting and refining with each word added. Customers can tap the generated image that best aligns with their vision and shop for visually similar products. The feature works best where visual details matter most, and customers can experience it today when searching for items in apparel and home, with more categories available over time.”
Amazon already has millions of products, many of them fake or fake-adjacent, mislabeled, drop-shipped, duplicated, or photographed into visual lies. The last thing the store needed was a feature that creates a perfect-looking product that nobody sells.
It is like window shopping, except the window is hallucinating.
Several companies have discovered the hard way that if you post an image of something-say a couch shaped like a gorilla-along with a price, you better be ready to produce that item if anyone orders it.
So this is what they spent half a billion in AI tokens on? If not for the planet, I'd suggest people use this as a free image generation tool.