How Does AI Affect Your Online Shopping?

[CleverNickName]

Here's a hypothetical situation*:

You are browsing around for some new gaming products online--perhaps you're browsing some video games on Steam, or looking at RPG supplements on DriveThruRPG, or looking through an online catalog from your favorite indie game publisher. Something catches your eye, and the price is decent (say ~$30), so you scroll down and read the details. And near the bottom, right before the credits, you find a statement saying that the product you were looking at--text, art, logos, maybe the whole package--was created with AI.

How does that singular statement affect you, the consumer, in that moment? Remember, you have nothing else to go on: you can't examine the product before purchasing it (you're shopping online), you don't have any information about the specific AI used or the extent to which it was used (the product page didn't elaborate), no other details. All you have is the product ad copy, the $30 price tag, and a statement saying the product was generated by AI.

Having read that AI statement, are you now more or less likely to purchase it? Does it seem more or less valuable? Do you care how the product was generated? Has your interest in the product piqued, or faded? Do you buy or reject it purely on principle? Check any that apply.

*This happened to me, on Steam yesterday. And between that, and the thread about AI products and Amazon, I was inspired to put this poll together.

 

[Morrus]

How does that singular statement affect you, the consumer, in that moment? R

I nope out immediately.

 

[delericho]

In general, AI is a tool, much like any other, and can be used in good ways and bad ways (both in terms of quality and ethically). So I'm not automatically against it.

That said, the overwhelming majority of actual uses of AI have fallen on the bad side of the equation in one way or another. So a statement that a product used AI heavily does mean I'm less likely to want to buy it. Not an automatic deal-breaker... but given how few products I buy anyway, it's pretty close.

I'm generally not of a view that products should be required to disclose the use of AI. If I can tell it's been used, that almost certainly means it hasn't been used well enough; if I can't, it doesn't matter. I do think we need much tighter restrictions on the use of AI to get closer to requiring ethical use (we'll never be perfect, but we can be much better), but that really should come in the form of legislation - I'm under no illusions that my buying power has any weight whatsoever.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

Nope. Not wasting time or money on it.
If I wanted to wade through AI sludge, I'd generate it myself.

 

[sevenbastard]

Zero interest. There is so much real content why would we ever need AI ?

 

[Morrus]

Besides IF I wanted AI slop, which I don’t, but IF I did, why would I pay somebody else for it? I have access to ChatGPT just like they have.

 

[thirdkingdom]

Strong no on AI for me.

 

[Blue]

Okay, generative AI is a tool. As a tool it can be useful. My go-to is that they've trained models on decades of weather patterns and can come up with forecasts faster than the big simulation models, and for less compute (= energy, cooling, water, etc.)

That said, the two major types of tools that a product would use are LLMs (ChatGPT and ilk) or art. And both of those have generally been trained on material that has been unethically sourced. So I'm not for use of that. There are repercussions to that, where small creators who would not be able to afford things like interior art may be put to the wayside. I had to examine that, but I don't believe that gives them the right to use unethically sourced material directly, even if the other option is it never gets published.

The line is fuzzier if the author(s) used AI non-directly. "Hey, give me a list of steps to organize what I need to do to kickstart something" and other organizational issues, doing things like generating lists that are then human-curated for ideas but not used directly, or even generating links to specific research/information hard to find with a search engine.

While this specifies that I can't examine the product ahead of time, I assume I have the tools I normally have while purchasing online, such as ratings and reviews, including from other sites. An indie game that people are raving about and has 4.7 stars or Overwhelmingly Positive or whatever system is being used to rate have that from people who have seen the product. So it doesn't reduce the value, since that's been determined by it's current content, which has part AI, even if it may change my buying decision because of ethics. iPhones may have been put together with child labor in the past so I wouldn't buy them then, but that doesn't make the value delivered by the iPhone less.

 

[wicked cool]

When I’m watching say crit role on YouTube and I get those ai narrated video game commercials like the one that’s says no ads I literally turn the sound off

 

[Blue]

Besides IF I wanted AI slop, which I don’t, but IF I did, why would I pay somebody else for it? I have access to ChatGPT just like they have.

Just to play devil's advocate, but that makes a bunch of assumptions:
1. It's all made from AI, and there are no human-created parts you want. Say it's a single individual using AI for interior art for an otherwise solid project who can't affort to hire an artist for likely more than it will ever make? (Note: I'd still skip it because of the ethics of the generative art model training, but since you were willing to use ChatGPT that doesn't seem to be a blockage.)
2. That you want to invest the time it would take to do it. Assuming it's just a few prompts to generate the same contents isn't necessarily true.
3. Nor is assuming that what they did is obvious/intuitive -- if someone had a fresh idea but didn't have the skills to realize it and leaned on AI, you will turn down what they, the creator of the idea did, but are willing to steal their idea without compensation so you can generate it yourself in AI? So it's still using AI, but now you're stealing a creator's vision and concept as well? And that's "better"?

Again, I have strong issues with the ethics of the training models of the art and LLM generative AIs. But isn't taking someone's ideas without compensation is equally as unethical as taking other things people have created without compensation. Even if you justify it with "they used AI"?