It's too bad, because AI could be a new way of buying things.

It will probably still be a new way of buying things- I hope an AI assisted shopping experience continues to exist on some platform, because I want to use it.

I already use AI to make all kinds of buying decisions. If OpenAI were smart they would just monetize this instead of trying to corrupt the chat interface with ads.

I actually am fairly bullish on this, because in the competitive landscape of AI it seems like there will be a company out there willing to make an ad-free model that's good enough for reasons other than serving me an ad.

Just like Apple makes hardware that's ad-free and pro-privacy enough, just because it's a product differentiator. (I'm not under any illusion that Apple wouldn't sell my data if it was in their own interests).

They sort of already have this (IIRC Perplexity also has it), there's a "shopping" specific mode which presumably adds affiliate links. But even GPT-5.1 hallucinates a bit too much to be trusted buying anything without me as a human-in-the-loop. I tried to have it help me find climbing shoes for my cuboid feet and it went from making up specifications to telling me to buy shoes that don't fit and cutting them up with tools which wouldn't work.

EDIT: Looks like they don't add affiliate links? I'm surprised, it seems like a natural thing to do outside of the incentive to bias purchasing sources.