Some people love buying Christmas gifts. Polly Arrowsmith starts taking note of what her friends and family like and then looks for bargains, slowly and carefully. Vie Portland begins its shopping in January and has a theme each year, from heart mirrors to inspirational books. And Betsy Benn spent so much time thinking about gifts that she ended up opening her own online gift business.
How would these gift experts react to a trend that is either a time-saving idea or a terrible corruption of the Christmas spirit: asking ChatGPT to do it for them?
The answer, like Christmas Day, will have to wait. But do people really ask ChatGPT to write their Christmas lists? It seems so. There are dozens of personalized messages in Open AI’s tool for people to generate Christmas gift lists and a flood of posts on Reddit from people seeking inspiration through a conversation with a chatbot.
Are there many people doing this? The ChatGPT bot didn’t know, or if it did, it wasn’t telling the Observer. The Open AI spokesperson didn’t know either, but said people had also been taking Christmas quizzes, designing cards and coming up with “creative responses” to their children’s letters to Santa. (Other AI chatbots, Gemini and Google’s Perplexity AI, were similarly ignorant.)
Although only a handful of people are doing it so far, AI companies hope more will start soon. Last week, Perplexity launched “Buy with Pro” in the US, an artificially intelligent shopping assistant that will allow users to search for products and then purchase them on the Perplexity website, for $20 a month.
This move, days before the peak of the Black Friday retail frenzy, is a direct attack on Google’s stranglehold on online advertising, according to Jai Khan, director of Push, a digital marketing agency.
“Some people start their shopping trips on Amazon and some young people use TikTok, but Google has been the dominant player,” he said. “The most important thing for us is what will happen to Google ads if people start coming to ChatGPT for answers.”
There are plenty of holiday gift guides online predicting which products will be the subject of the annual toy hysteria (keep an eye out for Furbies revamps and Beyblade spinning tops, a wriggling mother duck with ducklings, and a fart blaster). , while the Lego ones Wicked The range is flying off the shelves.
Online searching is a small part of gift shopping for Portland, a 53-year-old trusted coach from Winchester. “I tend to buy gifts all year round; it’s very frustrating when you find the perfect gift in February and it’s out of production by December,” she said. “It also helps with budgeting.”
Benn hates the idea of giving gifts directly to charity shops. “I want my loved ones to feel truly seen, truly appreciated for their own quirks,” she said. The Cheltenham man, 49, founded betsybenn.com, a company that sells personalized gifts such as Christmas tree decorations.
“The joy when the recipient knows this is just for them and not a bottle of wine hastily grabbed into a holiday gift bag is an unbeatable feeling. And don’t we all just want to be seen and understood? Isn’t that the goal of human connection?
The problem – as anyone who receives a can of deodorant, an expired voucher or red underwear two sizes too big will know – is that too often gifts show that the giver has not seen or understood.
“Between 60% and 70% of people make mistakes when buying Christmas gifts,” said Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, professor of consumer psychology at Anglia Ruskin University. “Looking at buying patterns, most people leave it to the last minute and it just shows that they have no idea what they’re going to buy anyway.”
Add to that the confusion of trying to understand what someone from a completely different generation might enjoy, and it’s easy to see why an AI-generated list could be a solution to this complex social negotiation.
“The reality is that AI is a tool that collects data from the Internet and produces two plus two equals four,” Jansson-Boyd said. “You can’t address emotions, you can’t personalize them, because you can’t quantify them.
“That said, I think it’s a great idea, because we often run out of ideas ourselves.”
Faced with this type of problem – a YouGov survey Last year it was found that 45% of Christmas shoppers were stressed about gift shopping; some people choose not to do it completely and just tell people what they want.
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Deciding what one may want is in itself a form of terror for some. AI can also be a solution here, as most AI robots offer users the option to remember conversations and use them to inform future responses.
“You can ask ChatGPT, ‘Tell me something about myself that I don’t know,'” Khan said. “The insights you gain are fascinating.”
We could reach a point where regular users find that their best chance of being seen and understood is through their AI bot.
So how ObserverWhat do gift gurus do with ChatGPT?
Arrowsmith was not impressed with the suggestions for her sister. He suggested Neom candles “but the prices were considerably higher than what I bought yesterday in the Black Friday sales,” he said. “Everything was so generic. I bought her designer bags, not generic handbags.
“I also repeated the exercise with my dad: 83 years old, man with some interests,” he said. “We figured you might like a foot massage machine, a personalized cane, a meal delivery service or a newspaper subscription. My dad would wonder why I bought him any of these things, since he buys his own subscriptions, buys groceries, and walks 20,000 steps a day.”
Portland asked what she could get a “time-poor mother of disabled children” and thought suggestions of spa days and long baths were inappropriate. “It may be what you need, but not what you have time for,” he said. Other options were cleaning services, delivery of boxes of food and clothing, which created “a risk of offense by getting the wrong size.”
“And there was a suggestion of gifts for his children; I wouldn’t do that. That makes everything focus on her as a mother and not as an individual.”
Benn discovered that the way to avoid generic, clichéd gifts was to keep asking questions.
“When you start adding interests or personalities, you get much better results; I love that,” he said. “You might find incredible success on your first try, or you might be inspired by some of the suggestions and follow the rabbit hole to something epic.
“If someone said they had used AI to help them find a gift for me, just the fact that they thought of me, sat down, explored options, and found something that seemed perfect to them, well, it would fill my heart to the brim. .”