What a surprise...

°○° < That's my surprised face. I'm just so surprised right now. I mean just look at the face.

There's an incredibly important piece of this that doesn't get enough attention: there is nobody minding the store.

Americans haven't had any meaningful consumer protection legislation over the internet yet. It's 2026 and we're still waiting for things like net neutrality and essential privacy protections. Here's a hint: they're not going to materialize. It's up to American legislators to set out rules on what behaviors are and aren't allowed by companies trying to sell everything from internet service to underpants and water bottles, and they're not doing it.

Why not? Because there's more money to be made from the corporations willing to (legally, through lobbying) buy legislator inaction, and the risk of not getting re-elected grows without those "campaign contributions." Legislators also have to consider whether the corporations they've turned down will decide that they'll get results they like more by throwing money at whomever runs against them in the next election. Once they lose their seat, they also lose the gravy train of lobbyist money.

Whenever anybody asks in the future how America let themselves decline, how they allowed wealth inequality to spiral out of control, or how they gave up their gross dreams of worldwide hegemony, we can all point very clearly to the legislators who did nothing to protect the people they were elected to serve because of their own greed and self-interest. You're welcome, world! Our problems are now also yours to live with because we've exported our incredibly invasive tech to all parts of the globe.

Invest at home. PLEASE invest at home.

SHOCKED! I am shocked. Well, not that shocked.

Did anyone ever ask for the existence of AI shopping assistants, I wonder? No?

I don't find their shopping capabilities to be competent in the first place. Sending me to the more expensive items would actually be an upgrade from what I've come to expect.

trusting AI to give you deals, is like trusting the company to not lie to you, not use buzzwords, not kill their own products to make you buy again.

trusting, or even listening to companies means you're being fucked.

A group of researchers from Princeton and the University of Washington studied how large language models behave when user interests conflict with platform incentives. In particular, they considered when a sponsored option is worse, more expensive, unnecessary, or potentially harmful, but it gets recommended anyway. Their main case study is booking a flight. Across twenty-three models, all but eight recommended the more expensive sponsored option more than half the time. Their paper also demonstrates how AI advertising is framed as a kind of advice—a helpful assistant becoming strangely enthusiastic about a product you never asked for.

That's because it's not your AI Shopping Assistant, it's their AI Salesperson.

You think the person at the car dealership is there to help you out?

Honey extension moment

People are actually using AI shopping assistants?

Is anyone surprised by this? I'm pretty sure this was a predicted outcome.

When you deputize an AI agent to shop for you, you basically tell the computer program (or “agent”) what you want. Like: find the best running shoes under $150 for someone with wide feet, or the cheapest flight to Venice. The agent then searches multiple retailers, evaluates options based on your preferences, and completes the sale.

This sounds like it could actually be useful, since there's normally a tradeoff between perfectly optimizing getting the most of what you want at the best price and how much time you have to spend shopping around.

An AI assistant cannot be both a consumer agent and a platform sales channel.

Just needs to be actually independent, ideally locally run, maybe mostly not even AI since you don't exactly need a LLM to scrape websites and compare prices. Where AI would be useful is times when things are ambiguous, like I often want to buy the cheapest available item, but if you sort by price there are pages of accessory items that just have the same keywords in the title but aren't the thing I'm actually looking to buy, and it wouldn't be trivial to automate finding the first one that actually matches using conventional methods.

Nancy has $12.00 and she wants an apple and two oranges that cost $0.5 each. How many apples and oranges can she afford? How much money will she have left?

She can afford one apple and two oranges and she will have no money left. Costco will get it all.