Trusting AI for holiday shopping? Be careful. ChatGPT might direct you to a fake shopping site.
Let’s get one thing straight: AI is failing at online shopping.
You might think you can save time by asking the models for the best holiday deals, but you might be walking right into a trap.
A brand-new study from Podqi has dropped a reality check on our AI-powered future.
Researchers there tested top AI engines with thousands of shopping questions, and the results look grim. Perplexity spat out fake, counterfeit, or dead retail websites in a whopping 15% of its answers. Whereas ChatGPT failed 8% of the time, and Google’s Gemini performed slightly better at 4%.
What’s even worse is that, in most of those cases, the chatbots actively recommended the scam sites instead of warning users about them.
This is a disaster- and bigger than what we can imagine.
The research exposes the glaring flaw in the current gen AI hype cycle.
Tech giants desperately want you to use their bots as ultimate search replacements. But gen AI regurgitates scraped data. It cannot reason, and it certainly cannot verify if a heavily discounted sneaker site belongs to a legitimate small business or a scammer trying to steal your credit card details.
We are offering these tools far too much blind trust.
When an authoritative-sounding bot hands you a link, you naturally assume the engine vetted the source. It didn’t.
Our advice? Don’t let a chatbot hand your wallet to a scammer. Stick to official brand websites, or prepare to learn a very expensive lesson this holiday season.
