I Used AI to Do All of My Holiday Shopping

In its initial responses, ChatGPT did not provide any links to the products. But it readily provided them when I asked, and while I didn’t click on each one, none seemed to have one Hallucinations. Claude, on the other hand, apologized and said it “can’t actually link directly to websites or products.” Anthropic has yet to release a web search feature for Cloud, but the company says it is working on it.

This technically makes Cloud the least useful chatbot I’ve tested for shopping. But it also means that Anthropic has so far avoided venturing into the morally murky territory of allowing its AI chatbots to scrape human-written product reviews from the web. Instead, Claude bases its product comparisons on its existing data sets. Confusion, on the other hand, says that thanks to Buy Pro With, people “no longer have to scroll through countless product reviews.”

When I asked Confusion what I should get for my editor-musician friend, it recommended a solar bike light set (I also mentioned that he was a cyclist). It was a good idea, but not exactly a milestone-birthday-worthy gift. I keep tweaking my prompts. What about a personalized leather guitar strap? I went down the rabbit hole.

The distraction was meant to enhance its shopping qualities, I began to realize, not just to help me generate new ideas or come up with highly thoughtful gifts. Confusion is playing the long game, slowly shifting our attention away from competing corners of the web, gaining a better understanding of how people like me are using its platform, and funneling that data into its growing AI models. Every time I needed to refine my searches because the initial results were often missing, I ended up on Perplexity’s app, which meant I wasn’t on Amazon and not on Google, although I ended up on both of those sites eventually. Perplexity Pro is not a full-fledged eCommerce site, nor is it “agentic” in any real way, but I am one of the millions of people who provide the information necessary to make these things happen.

When I turned to Google Gemini, the gifts I suggested for my 16-year-old niece weren’t bad, just uncreative and, in one case, confusing. It said I should buy him “a cat blanket to snuggle up with a good book”; It was unclear if the blanket was for her or her cat. A Kindle was a good idea. But I’m terrified of what she’d text me if I sent her Gemini’s recommended SAT prep book (probably “thx,” and nothing else). Among them, the app ideas for my editor-musician friend were equally inspiring: “vinyl records” and ” High quality headphones.”

I was using years old Gemini versionBut earlier this month, Google began rolling out a new version, Gemini 2.0, to developers and limited testers. The new AI model will “think several steps ahead and take action on your behalf,” the company said said. For now, that means taking action on the part of developers—executing the next step in their coding workflows—but I’m eagerly awaiting the day it can make its way through my shopping list.

ChatGPT eventually led me to an online spice shop where I bought some special baking ingredients for my friend, who at this point I had made up my mind to be a finalist. The Great British Bake-Off. In the end, I chatted with the AI ​​bots so long that many of the gifts I picked wouldn’t arrive until after Christmas. My niece will get cash on a card. My search for a friend’s milestone birthday gift was inconclusive. I decided to put the work on the road until January, a month full of innovation and agentic determination.