SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – The new world of AI is ever evolving. It can be used to answer simple questions.
"I do use ChatGPT sometimes when I have some questions about, like, what to do in a certain area,” Damian Dennison said.
"I definitely use ChatGPT to just kind of help myself out, like understand some things that I'm not too familiar with,” Jonatan Balbuena said.
New uses for the technology are being found every day, including helping you shop.
“When people are talking about AI personal shopping assistants, they are primarily talking about the types of things that you do type into a chatbot,” Stephanie Tully from the University of Southern California said.
Tully is a professor at USC who specializes in studying consumer behavior and how AI is playing a role in it.
She said these AI assistants are a more complex chatbot that's personalized to reflect your shopping habits.
"They can know that. Well, you've bought these types of things in the past, or also incorporate things that you say during the chat,” Tully said. “So you just say that you're specifically looking for this because you're going on a trip to this specific place in this specific month, and so they're going to incorporate that type of information.”
A recent poll by YouGov, an international online research group, shows a little more than 40% of Americans know about these shopping assistants.
But 14% of people are using them.
"I'd probably use it as a one-time thing just to see how it works and if it's convenient or not, but I'd probably just stay away from it, to be honest, and just probably do my own thing and just go to whatever I need to get,” Balbuena said.
That doesn't come as a surprise to Tully, considering how habitual shopping can be.
"They know how they look at the star ratings, they know which kinds of reviews they like to look at, right? And it can be hard to break those habits for a number of reasons,” Tully said. “So one might just be the effort involved, right? I have to think more about how I'm going to do it, which website I'm going to go to, and where I'm going to find the personal assistant."
Tully said it could be a trust factor too, with the new tech, considering the information it's using to base its answers on.
"The knowledge of that can make consumers really concerned that they're being manipulated or persuaded in ways that they may not realize that they're relying only on these AI personal shopping assistants,” Tully said.
Some feel it could take some time to warm up to things like these AI shopping assistants.
"I think in the future, the next five years we'll be using a lot more AI than we do right now, but (it's) still like pretty unfamiliar concept, so yeah, people just aren't really using it as much,” Dennison said.
