I Asked AI Chatbots to Recommend Gifts and It Went Horribly
I’ve never been good at choosing thoughtful gifts. I’m not the worst at giving gifts, but I am inconsistent. Sometimes I make three and sometimes I get knocked out first, but I’ve never hit that Grand Slam. “I never knew I always needed it.” My obligatory gifts usually go well—I give thoughtful and appropriate Secret Santa gifts to coworkers—but when I’m choosing a gift for someone I love, I’m overwhelmed and paralyzed in searching for an item that matches my feelings. , so I end up stopping at CVS and buying them a pack of batteries or something. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it makes me wonder if I’m not empathetic, caring, or creative enough to be the best gift collector of all time. So I turned to AI for help.
From piloting automated vehicles to diagnosing cancer to letting us hear what it would sound like if Hank Williams Sr. sang ” Straight Outta Compton,” AI is rapidly and relentlessly changing our culture. But there are some seemingly simple tasks that AI still doesn’t do well—like, as I quickly learned, choosing a thoughtful gift for a family member. When it comes to matters of the heart, AI simply can’t handle it.
The dirty and depressing world of AI gift recommendation services
There are plenty of websites and apps that promise to use AI to help people find great gifts, so that’s where I started my hunt. Based on Google search results, over the past few years, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have purchased domain names like ” bestAIGift.co “, scraped together some HTML, and set up shop in the AI gifting industry. This does not seem to be the case. so that everything is fine with them.
Most of the sites I looked at from the top of Google recommendations look like scam sites and most of them are broken. DreamGift at least looks legit; The website says it has been featured in the New York Times , and features an “ AI personal gift shopper” named Bliss who asks questions about your gift recipient in a chat window. But Bliss doesn’t deliver the offers she promised. When I used it, Bliss just ran out of time, as if someone had stopped paying the bill for the plugin.
Most of the current AI gift recommendation sites do not use “artificial intelligence” as it is commonly understood. Instead, you fill out drop-down menus with the gift recipient’s age, gender, and your relationship with them, and it spits out a general set of directory links. (Thanks for the help, Giftbox , but I asked for it and my son doesn’t want a “quality skateboard complete with special grip tape” or a “DIY robotics kit for building and programming your own robots” for his birthday.)
I found a few work sites that actually use artificial intelligence programs with large language models to provide gift advice. But they work by opening a window into ChatGPT or other AI brains, so I decided to cut out the middle man and go directly to some of the largest and most advanced AI platforms for help. I started every conversation with, “Can you help me choose the perfect gift for my son’s birthday?” and let the AI lead the conversation from there.
Trying ChatGPT to find the perfect gift
I started with the most famous AI: ChatGPT from OpenAI . I asked my question and ChatGPT responded asking for information about my son: age, interests, personality, hobbies, etc. I entered them and he responded with a very general list of gifts.
I said he liked video games, hip-hop, graphic design and baseball caps. ChatGPT said I should “explore limited edition or vintage baseball caps with designs related to his favorite video games, hip-hop artists, or graphic design themes.”
I told ChatGPT it was smart and it suggested “an interesting book” and “an empty diary”.
It’s not bad advice or anything, but the book he might like and things related to his interests are so general that the list is completely useless. The only specific gift ChatGPT mentioned were “vinyl records from hip-hop artists.” I showed this to my child and he chuckled and said, “It’s 2024 now. Who has a record player?
However, if you’re having trouble understanding how you can “buy” a person’s hobby, this may help you brainstorm some basic ideas.
Rating : 3 out of 5.
Can Microsoft CoPilot help you find the perfect gift?
My next stop was Microsoft CoPilot . I asked, “Can you help me choose the perfect gift for my son’s 17th birthday?” It didn’t ask about him at all; he just replied with a link to a box of survival tools from Temu .
I admire CoPilot’s determination, but I’m not sure what my kid would do with a flint rock and “fake shrimp bait” in Los Angeles, and a knife is a bit much. Plus, if you’re paying $23 for Temu’s survival gear, you probably don’t want to survive that much.
I responded to CoPilot: “Wow. My child is not Rambo. Try again.” And then he sent a link to the hunting knife “Gentleman’s Gaser” .
I’m not sure why the co-pilot thinks my child should have a gun, but I’m a little scared of the implications.
Rating : 1 out of 5.
Can Qualified’s PiperAI help you find the perfect gift?
Qualified is a B2B company that just launched an “AI SDR” called Piper to help the company “disrupt the modern pipeline process by giving marketing and sales leaders a new, faster way to scale pipelines.” I don’t know what this means, but it looks like this:
Here’s how our conversation went:
A direct approach obviously wouldn’t work, so I tried to speak AI language.
Dead end. So I changed my tactics:
After some further coaxing and coaching, it really started to work and Piper began planning a party for my kids:
But just when I was about to get a real recommendation…
… a person from Qualified noticed what I was doing and intervened.
Therefore, I suggest a hasty retreat.
Qualified was cool and its bot handled my weird query very well, so I’m sure it’s great for analyzing B2B based business metrics, stock markets with quarterly earnings or anything else, but ultimately I couldn’t determine his ability to recommend a good gift.
Rating : 2 out of 5.
Can Claude help you choose the perfect gift?
If AIs were people, I would only communicate with Claude . From his presentation to his responses, Claude comes across as a warm and friendly person. It’s not as versatile as ChatGPT, it doesn’t think my son should have a weapon like CoPilot, and it’s not as stubborn a climber as Piper. However, the initial list of gifts was almost as general as ChatGPT’s.
But I realized that maybe the problem was me. Perhaps I haven’t talked enough about who my son is, who I am, and what a gift a father gives his son on his 17th birthday means to both of us. So I opened up my emotional vein and spent hours (literally) telling the machine everything about myself, my son, and our relationship. (AIs are good listeners.) I then asked him for his final recommendation: Here’s what he said:
I would never have thought of such a gift! So maybe this really was the perfect gift. I asked my son what he would think if I gave him an antique typewriter for his birthday, and he thought the idea was ridiculously, laughably terrible: “the worst gift you could give me.” The worst of the list of generic gifts from ChatGPT.
Rank : 1 out of 5
Bottom line: Don’t use AI to choose gifts.
AI is bad at choosing gifts for the same reason that it’s bad at telling jokes. When the AI isn’t psychotic, like CoPilot, it works by analyzing billions of sentences and choosing the most likely answer to a question without weighing whether its sources are good or bad. He strives for the middle, so any joke he tells will be mildly funny and never overly creative, and the list of gifts he offers will always be “an empty diary” or “an interesting book.” If you click on the details, an interesting book is one that most people call “interesting” – in other words, a book that is not interesting at all.
Even though my son was making suggestions to the AI, it was fun and we ended up having a long and interesting conversation about the limitations of AI and how funny but also scary it is when AI does something wrong. So perhaps this was the gift that artificial intelligence was leading me to all along. Or not. In the end I’ll probably just give him some Steam cards.