It's not so strange that e-commerce is the first thing that AI has visibly altered. Most "buy this thing" sites really just have one proposition at their core. The presentation is incidental. You can't have a website looking like it's still 2003, but you also don't really care what your 2025 shop front looks like. Your ads are there to draw attention, not to be works of art.

What does AI do, at its heart? It is literally trained to make things that can pass for what's ordinary. What's the best way to do that, normally? Make a bland thing that is straight down the middle of the road. Boring music, boring pictures, boring writing.

Now there are still some issues with common sense, due to the models lacking certain qualities that I'm sure experts are working on. Things like people with 8 fingers, lack of a model of physics, and so on. But we're already at a place where you could easily not spot a fake, especially while not paying attention.

So where does that leave us? AI is great at producing scaffolding. Lorem Ipsum, but for everything.

Humans come in to add a bit of agency. You have to take some risk when you're producing something, decisions have to be made. Taste, one might call it. And someone needs to be responsible for the decisions. Part of that is cleaning up obvious errors, but also part of it is customizing the skeleton so that it does what you want.

Brad Pitt as Rusty: "Don't use seven words when four will do. Don't shift your weight, look always at your mark but don't stare, be specific but not memorable, be funny but don't make him laugh. He's got to like you then forget you the moment you've left his side. And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances..."

(from Ocean's Eleven)

Shopping and ads are great domains for AI: you have clear feedback signals for whether the interaction was successful.

(Of course, you have to actually be using these signals, and not just cargo culting throwing LLM outputs everywhere.)