Christmas shopping is the worst: here's how to use AI to do it for you
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Christmas shopping is the bane of any sane person’s existence. It is laborious; full of hidden costs; the worst. I swore last year that I would never again submit myself to the ignominy of waiting in line for three hours to have gifts specially wrapped by the team at Selfridges and lugging it through Central London a week before December 25th, swarms of tourists cavorting down Oxford Street and nearly getting mowed down by rickshaws playing Wham.
Any self-respecting individual ought to feel the same way. Rest assured, there is good news, for I have found the solution to this annual conundrum in artificial intelligence. Using the likes of ChatGPT or its morally sentient counterpart, Claude AI, to do your Christmas shopping is, I submit, the best use of either technology. It’s like online shopping without the caveats: the endless scrolling through webpages searching for a reasonably palatable scarf/jacket/cardigan that isn’t from Asos/Primark/Shein. Ask ChatGPT to find you “a brown leather jacket with a collar that is also short and cropped so my legs look longer than they actually are”, and it will give you three options within a matter of seconds with links to the items at hand. Little descriptions accompany them – for instance, “this jacket features a high collar, long sleeves, and a sleek cropped design with a concealed zip and snap-button flap”. Très chic.
You can also clarify search filters rather than ticking or unticking arbitrary boxes on a webpage (“nothing fast fashion”; “no, no: MENswear”). Très freeing. You can even ask the chatbots to come up with ideas of their own – I asked them for advice on what to get my dad for Christmas (a man who is time-poor, desk-bound and has already read all four volumes of Margaret Thatcher’s biography). The best ideas came from Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, who suggested a smart speaker, a 1000-piece jigsaw and a leather desk pad.
![[Best Christmas gifts of 2024 for everyone, to get your shopping done with ease]](https://static.standard.co.uk/2024/09/18/14/11/bestxmasgifts.jpeg?crop=8:5,smart&quality=75&auto=webp&width=960)
