Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI shopping agent(theregister.com) |
Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI shopping agent(theregister.com) |
I don't want to live in a world where an AI agent is required to buy basic goods, just to compete with everyone else using them, and so businesses can optimize their supply chain to the point of product simply passing through the warehouse, without ever keeping inventory around.
This may look like an anticompetitive move from Amazon, and I'm not fan of Amazon, but I want shopping bots to fail. I think we are going in the wrong direction. We've seen how horrible shopping bots are, and I don't think the solution is to democratize them so more people have them. That simply makes the problem worse.
Oh no, the collector/status markets are doomed! How will society survive?
Seriously, I find it incredibly hard to empathize with those who peddle artificial scarcity of luxury goods. Just sell your stuff at the market clearing price, especially if your marginal costs are minimal. If there's no business left when doing that, too bad.
My concern is that this type of crazy behavior, and poor experience for normal people, will extend to more and more products as bot shopping becomes trivial or normalized.
Who’s to say advertising wouldn’t be just as effective on AIs as it is on humans?
Send through a pass that actually scrubs these data if you're concerned about residual "subconscious" influence on the agent that makes the decision.
If Amazon outright refuses to compete on terms and in a playing field that they don't get to fully control, all the better!