Some people like to shop Christmas gifts. Polly Arrowsmith starts making a note of what her friends and family like, and then looks for bargains, slowly and carefully. Vie Portland starts her shopping spree in January and each year has a theme, from heart mirrors to inspirational books. And Betsy Benn spent so much time thinking about gifts, she ended up opening her own online gift business.
How will these gift-giving experts respond to a trend that’s either a time-saving brainwave or a terrifying corruption of the Christmas spirit: ask ChatGPT to do it for them?
The answer, like Christmas Day, will have to wait. But really ask people ChatGPT to write their Christmas lists? It seems so. There are dozens of personalized prompts on Open AI’s tool for people to generate Christmas gift lists and a flurry of Reddit posts from people seeking inspiration through a conversation with a chatbot.
Do many people do this? ChatGPT’s bot didn’t know, or if it did, it didn’t have the Observer. Open AI’s spokesperson didn’t know either, but said people were also taking Christmas quizzes, designing cards and making “creative responses” to their children’s letters to Santa. (Other AI chatbots – Google’s Gemini and Perplexity AI – were similarly clueless.)
Even if only a handful of people are doing it so far, the AI companies expect more to start soon. Last week, Perplexity launched “Buy with Pro” in the US, an AI shopping assistant that will allow users to research products and then buy them on Perplexity’s website, for $20 a month.
The move, days before the height of the Black Friday retail frenzy, is a direct attack on Google’s online advertising stranglehold, according to Jai Khan, a director at Push, a digital marketing agency.
“Some people start their shopping journeys on Amazon, and some young people use TikTok, but Google has been the dominant player,” he said. “The big thing for us is what happens with Google ads when people start going to ChatGPT for answers.”
There are volumes of Christmas gift guides online that predict which products will be the subject of the annual toy hysteria (look out for revivals of Furbies and Beyblade spinners, a waddling mother duck with ducklings and a fart blaster), while Legos Wicked series is flying off the shelves.
Looking online is a small part of current shopping for Portland, a 53-year-old confidence coach from Winchester. “I tend to shop for gifts all year round – it’s very frustrating when you get the perfect gift in February, only for it to be out of stock in December,” she said. “It also helps with budgeting.”
Benn hates the idea of gifts from straight-to-charity shops. “I want my loved ones to feel truly seen, truly appreciated for their own quirks,” she said. The 49-year-old from Cheltenham founded betsybenn.com, a business selling personalized gifts such as Christmas tree decorations.
“The joy when the recipient knows it’s just for them and not a rushed bottle of wine in a festive gift bag is an unbeatable feeling. And don’t we all just want to be seen and understood? Isn’t that the whole point of human connection?”
The problem – as anyone who gets a can of deodorant, an outdated voucher or red underwear that’s two sizes too big will know – is that gifts too often prove that the giver didn’t see or understand.
“Between 60% and 70% of people buy the wrong Christmas presents,” says Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, professor of consumer psychology at Anglia Ruskin University. “If we look at shopping patterns, the majority of people leave it until the last minute and it just shows that they have no idea what they’re going to buy anyway.”
Add in the confusion of trying to gauge what someone from a completely different generation might enjoy and it’s easy to see why an AI-generated list could be a solution to this complex social negotiation.
“The reality is that AI is a tool that takes data from the Internet and comes up with two plus two equals four,” Jansson-Boyd said. “It can’t do emotion, it can’t do personalization because it can’t be quantified.
“That said, I think it’s a good idea because we often have ideas ourselves.”
Faced with this kind of problem – a YouGov poll last year found that 45% of Christmas shoppers were over stressed gift shopping – some people opt out completely and only tell people what they want.
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Deciding what you might want is itself a form of terror for some. AI could also be a solution there, as most AI bots give users the option to remember conversations and use them to inform future responses.
“You can ask ChatGPT, ‘Tell me something about myself that I don’t know,'” Khan said. “The insights you get back are fascinating.”
We may reach a point where heavy users have their best chance of being seen and understood by their AI bot.
So how did the Observers gift gurus interact with ChatGPT?
Arrowsmith was not impressed with the suggestions for her sister. It suggested Neom candles “but the prices were significantly higher than what I bought yesterday on Black Friday deals”, she said. “Everything was so generic. I bought her designer bags, not generic tote bags.
“I also repeated the exercise for my father: 83, man with a few interests,” she said. “It assumed he might like a foot massager, a personal cane, a meal delivery service or a newspaper subscription. My dad would wonder why I bought him any of this stuff, since he buys his own subscriptions, does his grocery shopping, and walks 20,000 steps a day.”
Portland asked what she could get a “time-poor mom of disabled kids” and thought the suggestions of spa days and long baths were inappropriate. “It might be what she needs, but not what she has time for,” she said. Other options were cleaning services, food delivery boxes and clothes, which “create a risk of infringement, with the wrong size”.
“And there was a suggestion of gifts for her children – I wouldn’t do that. It makes everything just about her as a mother, and not as an individual.”
Benn found that the way to avoid clichéd, generic gifts was to keep asking questions.
“When you start adding interests or personalities, you get much better results — I love that,” she said. “You might find a great hit on your first try, or find yourself inspired by some of the suggestions and follow the rabbit hole to something epic.
“If someone said they used AI to help them find a gift for me, just the fact that they thought of me, sat down, explored options and found something they thought was perfect, well, that would fills my heart to the brim.”
