Amazon displays AI product images when you search for any reason.

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it will display AI-generated images of products based on user searches in its shopping app. That’s right – a retailer where people are looking for real products believes that displaying fake photos helps consumers to find better what they are looking for.

Enough.

So Amazon says in a blog post that the function will work. Customers may have something in mind, but do not know the right term to describe it in such a way that useful results are achieved. (The examples that Amazon calls are things like “waterfall” for a shirt style or “rattan” for furniture.)

When someone enters a search request, different AI-generated product images are displayed under his autocompletion suggestions. (See photo above.)

For example, if you are looking for a blue Gingham dress, you might see some clothes styles – short or long sleeves, different lengths and other differences – as visual options. The idea is that by clicking on one of them you will be redirected to search results that fit better to this style, supported by the visual search features of Amazon.

In reality, it is quite banal for a retailer to invent fake products to lead users to search results.

First of all, it may be misleading: customers who do not read attentively may think that they are forwarded to a page where they can find exactly this dress, and then are disappointed if it is not available. And it asks the quite obvious question why you should invent product images if you have a website full of real photos of real products – which is probably what an online buyer actually wants to see.

The function follows a number of other attempts by Amazon to integrate AI into its retail site and shopping app, with mixed results. It is more useful that Amazon already summarizes customer reviews about AI, so you do not need to read them all to get an impression of the most important advantages and disadvantages of a product. It is even more bizarre that last year the company has introduced a short audio product composition, in which AI experts describe the highlights of a Podcast-style product.

Other current AI functions include AI-generated “purchasable collages” to guide people on curated pages dedicated to a specific fashion style; Amazon Lens Live, which scans products in the field of view of a camera to find visual matches; the ability to add text to visual searches; and a visual search widget for the lock screen for iOS.

At the beginning of this month, Amazon also replaced its callus AI chatbot by Alexa for Shopping to allow purchase queries in natural language by language and text.