I made AI my shopping assistant and wanted to fire it almost immediately

AI writes, teaches, and even saves lives. But can it assist in a fashion crisis?

For quite a while now, I’ve been challenging myself not to buy fast fashion and, in case I really need a piece of clothing, to try and find it either at physical thrift stores or on platforms such as Vinted.

I’ve already tried to employ apps that could help me dodge forged goods online, so I thought maybe there might be a tool that could help me further with my shopping needs.

Limiting myself to only buying what I actually need, I faced a few challenges along the way. First, I don’t have as much time to go to physical stores as I thought. Second, I find it tricky to find the exact thing I have a picture of in my head while aimlessly scrolling through Vinted or Vestiare Collective.

For example, I need a plain but high-quality fitted shirt that I know I could find in many places. However, considering that I’m trying to get my karma points by being more sustainable and first going with pre-owned and affordable fashion, this puts a strain on my search.

I knew that features such as Google virtual shopping tools existed, but I never used them unless I wanted to know how unaffordable Carrie Bradshaw’s newspaper dress from Sex and the City was for me.

What’s out there to help in an online shopping search?

I had the idea to start using AI after watching the Lithuanian equivalent of Shark Tank, a TV show in which successful business people invest in promising startups.

In one of the episodes the creators of Garmio, an “AI-powered fashion assistant,” showed how their app can help find a certain piece of clothing that you saw someone else wearing.

While it certainly isn’t a groundbreaking idea, or at least it wasn’t to the investors, which I agreed with, I could relate to the creators' statement that sometimes shopping online feels like you’re in a huge bazaar where you have to find something you like from a huge pile of unflattering things.

I decided to give the app a go because I was looking for a very specific piece of clothing. I knew where to buy it, how much it cost, and what sizes they had left, but I wanted to see what information Garmio could provide me with on the item.

The app turned out to be very saturated in a way that the search results it provided were limited to the partner businesses. For example, if I was looking for a Nike training top in collaboration with the artist Anna Deller-Yee, it did show similar results, but it wasn’t entirely what I was looking for as it could only show me the results from its partner, Soulz.

While the app was rather disappointing, with reviews proving that my incompetent searching wasn't to blame, it made me think about whether there might be a similar platform for secondhand goods.

Welcome to an online thrift bazaar where you can find everything and nothing

As the saying goes, anything you can think of already exists. I found Encore, an AI-driven platform that uses user-written prompts to find your dream pieces from multiple pre-owned fashion websites.

At first, this sounded rather promising, especially since there are multiple countries a user could expand their search to. I didn’t think much about how I would ship certain items from, let’s say, Canada to Lithuania, and I’m glad that I didn’t because I already noticed some flaws with the location feature.

For example, after writing a prompt and asking for a “white, fitted woman’s shirt in size S, preferably from Ralph Lauren,” I wanted to change the location from France to the US, knowing that perhaps the search results would change. However, it didn’t, making me return to the main page, select the US, and add the same prompt to see other results.

One of the things that I discovered about the platform was that Encore’s search engine can understand even the most bizarre prompts and find similar pieces to what your favorite TV show or movie character has worn.

To make sure that it really works, I even got a monthly “Pro” subscription that would allow me to use the “most advanced fashion model built on top of GPT-4” and “find items by uploading images.” The monthly subscription costs $4, $2 if you use the discount code that Encore sends after signing up to the platform.

Is my obsession with Cher’s yellow suit from the movie Clueless worth $2? I think so. What was interesting to notice is that the search result that included the picture was much more accurate than the written prompt.

What I also noticed is how different the search results are when the app is asked to find clothing (for example, a suit inspired by Cher’s yellow suit from Clueless, size S) in the US and France (considering that the country I’m in is not on their list and I don't know whether I would be able to ship the item I want from the US).

The search in the US seemed to be more “accurate,” even showing me an actual costume-like suit from Clueless, while the search in France showed me pieces found based on more generic keywords (“yellow,” “blazer,” etc.).

Such differences are understandable, considering different locations and what users decide to sell, but it made me feel like I was scrolling through an unfiltered feed.

The same thing happened when I tried to find “a newspaper dress similar to the one Carrie Bradshaw wore on Sex and the City,” but I got no similar search results.

While it was fun to play with AI in this kind of setting, once again, I soon felt like I was caught up in an endless scrolling game, seeing AI as an occasionally good filter system but not much of an actual assistant.