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Posted by simianwords 22 hours ago

Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com(www.forbes.com)
150 points | 157 commentspage 2
meowtimemania 22 hours ago|
I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse.

No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.

strulovich 21 hours ago||
I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores.

It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.

causal 21 hours ago||
Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
_superposition_ 7 hours ago||
I'm sure Facebook will allow agents to post any day now...
drivebyhooting 19 hours ago||
I don’t get it.

Codex has full computer use capability. Surely such bans mean nothing even in the very near term.

geodel 22 hours ago||
Thank you Amazon for standing up for everyman Rufus. We don't need AI agent from evil ad giants.
majorchord 22 hours ago||
How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.
kqgnkqgn 22 hours ago|||
I assume it was sarcasm, Rufus is an Amazon AI product.
a4isms 22 hours ago||
And there go my Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure memories. George Carlin's Rufus was a "good 'un."
digdugdirk 22 hours ago||||
Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page.

I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.

geodel 21 hours ago||
There was internal JIRA ticket to rename Rufus -> Doofus as to dramatically improve performance and sentiment among shoppers on Amazon site.

We should see this improved version soon.

suprfsat 22 hours ago||||
Amazon: famously not evil ad giant.
Brian_K_White 22 hours ago|||
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stephen_cagle 21 hours ago|||
This is not them standing up for the small guy, this is them seeing their actual profit center in retail (advertisement and paid promotion) evaporating if human beings never view their listings.
Jcampuzano2 22 hours ago||
Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning.

This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.

svachalek 21 hours ago||
Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.
sejej 21 hours ago||
You’re deluded if you think it’s as an easy as ‘send agent task, hey Presto - done’.
sejej 21 hours ago|||
It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all.

I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on. Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.

simianwords 21 hours ago||
its not going anywhere. Agents are the future.
sejej 21 hours ago|||
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sejej 21 hours ago|||
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simianwords 21 hours ago||
i think you are having a hard time coping
sejej 21 hours ago||
Or you’re having a hard time accepting the vast majority of people are not like you.

You sound like the idiots who claimed the death of salesforce.

Utter morons with zero taste.

simianwords 21 hours ago||
its clear that this is getting to you, maybe sit this one out?
jejee112 20 hours ago||
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watwut 20 hours ago|||
Of course they will be influencable. It is already possible to poison LLM output. It will happen with agents too.
simianwords 22 hours ago||
Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally.

These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use.

And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need.

Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?

wartywhoa23 19 hours ago||
This all has been progressively looking more and more like Stanislav Lem's Washing Machine Tragedy. <Emoji of a monkey holding its eyes shut>.
stbenjam 22 hours ago||
It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?
shagie 22 hours ago|
Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny.

The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )

doctoboggan 21 hours ago||
This is why the chrome driver plugin and similar tools are so important. The site shouldn't know or care if its me or my agent working on my behalf.
oybng 21 hours ago||
Amazon is genuinely unusable since forcing their own Rufus agent. A 300LOC userscript is the minimum to get it functioning again.
rkagerer 21 hours ago|
This is straightforward to counter. Meatbag-as-a-service to hit the Buy button.

And so the cat and mouse game carries on...

tantalor 21 hours ago|
That's already a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_shopper

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