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by canes123456 42 days ago
Yes, I absolutely use AI To find stuff to buy. The results are mediocre but the alternatives are even worse. Google search for any product is SEO garbage. Reddit is somewhat useful for filled with astroturfing and tedious to get actual signal from. AI can summarize the Reddit recommendations and set filters to save time a bit.
4 comments

From what I see of my own use and friends use of "AI" - it is a glorified search aggragator with nice pretty print output which has replaced Google search because all involved are tired of wasting time with the cesspool that vanilla search has become.
this is def. the #1 use case, and it's why we can't have nice things. I use the internet to go to places I already know most of the time; when I use a search engine to try and find something it's a complete failure - often because of all the LLM generated astroturfing.
I don’t get the conflict? I want ai to write code I can read and check before pushing. I also want AI to do research and present results in a way I can review and make the final decision.

I don’t want AI to buy something without any way to audit its thought process or show primary source evidence. This is exactly the same as my stance for code.

For stores with strong curation, you could just skip the research phase and buy whatever Costco or Lee Valley is selling.
Goodness me, when are we just going to stop buying “products” already?