INNOVATION
It turns out that the majority of people are stressed out by the gifting process. So if holiday shopping contributes significantly to the prevalent sense of seasonal overwhelm, new AI interfaces have the opportunity to boost mental health during a notoriously touchy time of year.
Ruth Kogen Goodwin
How AI Chatbots Are Replacing Santa Claus This Christmas
While bots can make your holidays a little more jolly, they also open the doors to depersonalizing gift giving—and the inherent dangers of the emerging technology
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
“The stress of holiday gift giving is real,” Aura De Los Santos, clinical psychologist and specialist at the E- HEALTH project, told The Daily Beast.
As the old adage goes, it’s better to give than receive, but giving can be fraught with societal pressures. It turns out that the majority of people are stressed out by the gifting process. So if holiday shopping contributes significantly to the prevalent sense of seasonal overwhelm, new AI interfaces have the opportunity to boost mental health during a notoriously touchy time of year.
Santa’s Little AI Helper
Newer sites seem to be taking the opposite approach—especially those designed to secure the loyalties of Millennial and Gen Z shoppers—focusing more on ease of use. For example, baby registry site Poppylist offers a streamlined, minimalist experience. “We try to remove as many steps as possible,” Tamiz Ahmed, Poppylist co-founder and CTO, told The Daily Beast.
Enter: AI. Ahmed says that he’s optimistic that the technology will help hone search results and dial back some of the distraction inherent in the contemporary online shopping experience. The idea is that it’ll make things easier for customers; instead of requiring users to input multiple search terms and employ filters to whittle down their results, AI can source exactly what the user wants.
Google’s Generative AI search can help you find a product—even if it doesn’t technically exist. The technology can help hone search results and dial back some of the distraction inherent in the contemporary online shopping experience.
For example, if you search “I want a gift for a violin teacher” into Google’s AI generative search, it displays several categories of gifts including “Teaching Materials, Violin Accessories, and Music Books,” providing links to existing products in each category. It also includes broader, non-linked suggestions like “Concert Tickets” and “Gift Certificate” with a sentence under each explaining why the recipient might appreciate them.
But if you used the same query via Google’s regular search engine, more than 208 million results were generated. Sure, you might be able to find recommendations—but it would take much longer and be a more frustrating experience.
(The company has also acknowledged the potential of its AI tools to transform the holiday season in a blog post published in November describing different ways their generative search can help alleviate shopping woes.)
Ahmed sees this as a serious boon for the online shopping space. “Having an empty box for the user to enter a prompt into can be pretty intimidating. They don’t often know what to say even if you give them examples,” he said.
Newer AI tools allow users to upload a photo, or in the case of Google, even create and edit a photo based on multiple descriptors. These programs are able to better understand the way that humans naturally communicate, eliminating a longstanding and cumbersome translation barrier and providing results that more closely meet a user’s needs.
These new AI interfaces also allow developers and entrepreneurs to incorporate AI into their sites without using code. “It just means there’s going to be a lot of great ideas that are going to be brought to the market from people that maybe couldn’t have done it before because maybe they didn’t have the technical capabilities,” Tamiz said.
Developers are already taking full advantage of this newfound ease of use. Apps like Ollie.ai utilize a chatbot to help you narrow down a gift based on a few queries like “Christmas gift for wife who loves the outdoors.” It’ll chat with you as if you’re talking to your own personal elf at Santa’s workshop. Not only does it furnish some gifts that it thinks that might work based on your query, but it’ll send you across all different websites to help purchase it like Etsy and Amazon.
You’re a Mean One, Mr. GrinchGPT
At some point, though, tools like this do cross a line. If these new apps and tools mean a person can fulfill their holiday gift list with little thought and a few clicks, is there really a point to doing it at all?
The answer here is complex, and ultimately depends on the values of and relationship between the giver and the receiver. Some holiday gifts are simple. Ponying up extra cash for or slipping a gift card to folks like housekeepers or babysitters at the end of the year requires little deep thought. Using AI to choose and send gifts for these types of relationships hardly seems controversial.
However, when it comes to giving gifts to those we know and love well, the lines are blurrier. Would the recipient be upset to know that AI chose the gift rather than the giver?
AI has a long and sordid history due to the inherent bias built into its training data. Google’s generative AI tools are no exception—with many instances of it spewing misinformation and hate at user queries.
Kseniya Ovchinnikova via Getty
Moreover, there are also the issues inherent to AI to consider, like bias and harm. The emerging technology has a long and sordid history due to the inherent bias literally built into its training data. Google’s Generative AI tools are no exception—with many instances of it spewing misinformation and hate at user queries. Other notable instances have occurred with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot as well.
In the end, though, it is a combination of how AI is used and for what reason that will ultimately determine whether you should use it. Utilizing it to focus and personalize results can be a useful shortcut to ensuring that we give our loved ones something they actually want.
So go ahead and use AI to make the holidays a little easier—just do it mindfully. The technology, used as one of many strategies to help streamline holiday gift giving, can free up precious mental space during the jam packed holiday season. As always, though, don’t let it make the holidays all about a commercial exchange. Yes, we appreciate gifts for the gifted object itself, but more importantly, gifts are a symbol that you value the recipient and your relationship.
“Rarely do people remember the gifts they receive, but the memories of holiday experiences and connection are what brings the most joy,” Ruan said. This holiday, you can let technology give you a leg up. Just use your new-found time to relax and connect—leaving any grinchy feelings behind.
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