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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • Again, that’s literally what airlines and some hotels do. Based on how often you frequent the site and how often you search for flights for a specific date and location, they will change their prices for you specifically. The more interest you show and the closer it gets to that date, the higher the prices go. And your local pizza shop does this on a broad scale. They base their prices on demand - the more people willing to come in, the more they can raise their prices until they hit the threshold of what people are willing to pay.

    This is literally just taking targeted ads and applying it to pricing. A cross section of different values can identify you as an individual based on things like browsing habits and web searches, and companies can use that digital fingerprint to tailor online prices for you the same way that the airlines do. Even at a broad scale, they can tailor prices based on your income level, hobbies, and predicted price tolerance. Hell, with this concept they could even run fake sales at an individual level instead of site-wide like Amazon does during their Prime Day “sales.”

    This is one of the more irrational fears/predictions about the dynamic pricing infrastructure grocery stores want to implement - that they’ll start tailoring prices on things that you buy frequently or try to get you to buy extra with prices that look like a good deal. But it’s a lot more practical to do online than in a physical store.


  • Airline companies and hotels have been doing this for years. They track the location, time of year, and how frequently you’re looking to adjust their prices for you. You can sometimes get a different price for the exact same flight or hotel by using a private browser. You know those freezer doors with the display in them instead of a glass panel? Those have a camera in them as well to track which ads you spend the most time looking at so they can roll the most viewed ads more frequently. Some grocery stores are attempting to roll out digital pricing systems in their stores so that they can “dynamically change prices on items due to demand.”

    It’s only a small step from using an algorithm to create a profile on you to serve ads tailored to things that you’re interested in to companies using that same profile to “dynamically adjust prices due to demand.”








  • But these are the things people are complaining about - not AI itself, but the people making it, the reasons that they’re making it, and the consequences that that is having on the human condition.

    For your example, people don’t complain about it making Google obsolete or something, but about the fact that LLMs like ChatGPT are wrong about 53% of the time and often completely make stuff up, and that the companies making and pushing them as a replacement for search engines have collectively shrugged their shoulders and literally said “there’s nothing we can do to prevent it” when asked about these “hallucinations” as they call them.