Tech Talk
How it works, explained in a way that everyone can understand. Your weekly look into what makes your gadgets tick.
Welcome to Tech Talk, a weekly column about the things we use and how they work. We try to keep it simple here so everyone can understand how and why the gadget in your hand does what it does.
Things may become a little technical at times, as that’s the nature of technology — it can be complex and intricate. Together we can break it all down and make it accessible, though!
You might not care how any of this stuff happens, and that’s OK, too. Your tech gadgets are personal and should be fun. You never know though, you might just learn something …
Black Friday meets Cyberpunk
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released its shopping research assistant just in time for Black Friday. It’s a tool that promises to help you find exactly what you’re looking for by doing all the legwork of, well, researching products.
OpenAI isn’t alone here; the company just got the timing right to grab all the attention. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and every other tech company are working on the same thing. That should make you wonder why, and we’ll talk about that in a minute.
It’s no surprise that the shopping experience is terrible. Please don’t take my word for it, try it yourself: think of a product you have already researched and know you want to buy, then try to get ChatGPT to recommend it to you. It won’t. What it will do is either recommend the same product to two different people or be wildly off the mark.
What’s going on here?
Every tech company has the same goal: to make a sinful amount of money for the people invested in it. OpenAI did not make this tool so that your life can be less stressful while doing your holiday shopping; it did it with the idea of how it can profit.
Just look at Google, Amazon, IBM, or [name any tech company], and know that they all do the same thing. We should expect that because a multi-billion-dollar company usually isn’t very charitable and eventually wants to become a multi-trillion-dollar company. That’s just how business works.
I already know how this will be monetized in the future because of a small part of OpenAI’s announcement.
“If you’d like to purchase an item, you can click through to the retailers site to do so. In the future, you’ll be able to purchase directly through ChatGPT for merchants who are part of Instant Checkout where available.”
I have no problem with using an affiliate program, and I do it myself. When I recommend a product to you, the link I provide has a company like Amazon or Walmart send a few coins our way without you paying more. I’ll never recommend a product I would not buy and don’t care about 50 cents or so changing hands. At AC, we’re quick to tell you we use affiliate programs, and so does every other article on the internet.
My bigger concern is where and how these results are actually being tabulated, especially when two different people got the same product recommendation as a wildly poor result.
(For transparency’s sake, it was my boss and me, and the software recommended the Kobo Libra Colour, a great eReader in its own right, while specifically asking for advice on buying a black & white e-ink eReader.)
When an affiliate program turns into paid product placement, everything changes.
Ever see those terrible paid reviews for a product on Amazon? Company X sends a free gizmo to an influencer who then makes a two-minute video that tells you nothing, while saying the product is great and that you should buy it.
Amazon isn’t sponsoring these, but it does allow them, which makes them equally terrible alongside the seller. Anyway, those are just paid ads when it comes right down to it. Just like a TV commercial, complete with a disclaimer telling you someone was paid to say what they said. Jennifer Lopez might actually love Coach handbags, but she was paid to tell you she does.
Do your own research
This could become very problematic should the service get popular. We already tend to stop critical thinking once AI tells us “the answer,” and if companies are finding ways to make sure their products are being featured, the service itself becomes worthless.
It’s also possible that ChatGPT isn’t just showing you paid ads disguised as recommendations, and the sellers and retailers have already found a way to game the whole system — don’t think this is foolproof for even a second.
Either way, this is not a good look, and I really want to advise everyone to do their own research by reading verified reviews and visiting sites like ours if you’re curious about a product. Also, do your own shopping instead of letting AI try to make a mess of something else.
