AI Hell Is Begging a Chatbot for a $5 Discount on a Light Fixture

One of the worst implementations of Chatbots I’ve seen is Nibble, a chatbot on shopping sites that customers can “negotiate” with on the prices of specific items.

Nibble was founded in 2020, and was covered in some detail in a Forbes story last year, but has drawn a lot of attention this week because of tweet from a user who encountered it while shopping for a mattress that has since been retweeted almost 900 times, and that Nibble cofounder and co-CEO Jamie Ettedgui told me on a call has led to a spike of users interacting with Nibble. 

“This is absolute madness, £80 off for talking to a fucking AI,” Twitter user George McGowan said. Other posts on Twitter said the idea of haggling with a chatbot for a discount was “dystopian,” “Gamification of mattress purchases,” and “the dumbest timeline.”

“I don't think it's dystopian what we're trying to do,” Ettedgui told me. “I know why I get out of bed in the morning, and it’s to not to create some dystopian thing where I'm trying to screw people out of money [...] It comes from my frustration in some ways of being on a website and seeing a voucher code box, and I've got to go hunt around to look for a voucher code that some people have some people don't. I just want to say, look, I've seen your product somewhere else at this price. I would like to buy it here for this price.”

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