I thought I would try asking Bing’s AI for help in finding a good bathroom sink.
A huge problem with the search is that the manufacturers and/or retailers don’t provide consistent, accurate, complete data on dimensions.
If you’re lucky, there’s an drafting diagram showing precisely all the relevant dimensions from top, side, and front. This is wonderful, but rare.
More often, if there is a diagram, it omits the dimension I’m trying to determine, which is the inner bowl depth. It’s difficult to get a good measurement by hand because it’s a curved surface. Plus even if you’re in a store and they happen to have it in stock, it’ll either be on a display, on a shelf too high to reach, and they won’t let you go up a ladder, or it’ll be in a box, and you can’t really open it, although I suppose you could whip out a box cutter and just do it like a barbarian. Or you could buy it, take it home, look at it, and return it, which is also a hassle.
Often if there is a “depth” measurement reported, they are giving you the overall depth, from the top of the rim of the sink, to the bottom of the drain, which is an outside depth.
You can chat with someone on the website, and they don’t know. They’re sitting on a computer at their home or in an office somewhere, they don’t have physical access to the product either. They’re polite, but helpless, really. All they can do is search for you and read the same info you can read. And a lot of the time they are not good at reading comprehension and miss the criteria you give them. And in any case they are not so motivated to search as exhaustively as you would be as a customer who will be living with the thing for the next 50 years.
A lot of the time web chat on ecommerce sites is timed, because humans cost money and they are trying to maximize value for shareholders by minimizing costs and maximizing productivity as measured by conversations completed, rather than by customers highly satisfied, and so will disconnect while you’re in the middle of a conversation. Instead of having a button to end the chat, it’ll just drop you when it decides you’ve been idle for too long. This is the most aggravating thing, because then you usually have to start all over and go through the same thing with a different associate who can’t just look up your previous chat because all the sessions are disconnected from each other, and it’s like you’re a new person to them.
Another aggravation with human chat is that sometimes they are required to follow a formal style that is supposed to come off as polite, but really just gets in the way of having a productive conversation.
THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING [STORE] I AM [NAME] AND IT WILL BE MY PLEASURE TO ASSIST YOU TODAY. WE VALUE YOUR LOYALTY! WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?
I am looking for a [lengthy criteria]
I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A [repeats what I just said] AND IT WILL BE MY DELIGHT TO HELP YOU CHOOSE A [PRODUCT TYPE] THAT MEETS YOUR NEEDS! WOULD IT BE OK IF I TAKE 1-3 MINUTES TO FIND PRODUCTS?
Well yeah, that’s kinda what I just asked you to do, homes. Can’t you just get to it without all the ceremony?
CERTAINLY! PLEASE KNOW THAT WE ARE DOING OUR BEST TO ASSIST CUSTOMERS AND THAT DUE TO HIGH VOLUME THERE MAY BE DELAYS AND INTERRUPTIONS BUT IF YOU NEED TO TALK TO SOMEONE BY PHONE YOU CAN CALL [800 number] AT ANY TIME TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO IS ON A BAD CONNECTION AND MAYBE HAS A HARD TO UNDERSTAND FOREIGN ACCENT AND IS JUST AS USELESS AS I AM ALTHOUGH I AM TRYING MY BEST AND AM VERY HAPPY TO BE DOING WHAT I CAN.
So sometimes you can get something useful out of them, but mostly it’s like they can look at the same webpage that you can, and see the same information on it, and not be able to provide any more information or insight than that, because it’s the first time they ever looked at it themselves and they don’t know anything more about it than a random person off the street.
In the old days, a very long time ago, you’d walk into a store and there’d be some semi-retired guy who worked in the trades and they had like 35 years of experience installing the things and could tell you how to do it blindfolded, and they’d know every product like they were on the design team, like Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny knows cars, and they’d tell you the exact model number of the perfect thing that is exactly what you want, and know the exact location of it on the shelf, and they’d be the salt of the earth and feel like your favorite uncle and best friend and a guy who really cares all rolled into one, and he’d look just like Earnest Borgnine, and would actually be him 7/10 of the time. And he could crack a joke, talk about baseball, juggle and make balloon animals, and he knew a guy with a pony and could come to your son’s birthday if you gave him $50.
But I digress.
Maybe that’s not so much a back in the day thing, but it’s the sort of thing that you might have seen depicted in a dramatic film about shopping for hardware, where things happened as some script writer idealized. We get confused so easily by reality and artistic representations of an ideal reality, it’s hard to keep them straight in our heads sometimes.
AI is in much the same boat, with respect to what information is generally available online, but I thought it might be quicker, and better at sorting and filtering.
But actually, AI is much worse than a human. Of course, Bing’s AI is searching the general internet, and not an inventory catalog on a specific ecommerce site. The best Bing seems to be able to do is a hodgepodge of various sinks that are of all different types, and do not match the criteria closely.
In Star Trek, the ship computer is really good. It’s what we think of as the kind of AI we’d like to have.
Kirk: “Computer: Give me a listing of all bathroom sinks, drop-in, white, ceramic, measuring no more than 20in wide by 17in front-to-back, oval or rectangular, sorted by inner bowl depth.”
**60s mainframe noises** COMPUTING
THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION IS THE [MAKE] [MODEL] [SKU] [PRICE] IT HAS THE FOLLOWING DIMENSIONS [BLAH BLAH BLAH] WOULD YOU LIKE THE MATTER FABRICATOR TO CREATE ONE FOR YOU NOW AND INSTANTLY TRANSPORT IT TO YOUR VANITY CABINET IN THE COMMODE IN YOUR QUARTERS?”
Kirk: Yes. But first tell me the last digit of Pi.
But we don’t have that yet.
I’d even settle for:
SELECT * FROM SINKS WHERE AVAILABLE = “TRUE” AND INSTALLATION_TYPE = “DROP-IN” AND MATERIAL = “CERAMIC” AND COLOR LIKE “WHITE” AND WIDTH <= “20 in” AND LENGTH <= “17 in” ORDER BY BASIN_INNER_DEPTH DESC.
But there’s no global database of building materials like that, that I’m aware of.
So we have do do it the hard way. Or just settle for a sub-optimal solution, or a solution where the optimalization is unknown and unknowable.