Could artisanal AI help you find the perfect gift?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Etsy, the marketplace known for selling one-of-a-kind handmade items, is hoping artificial intelligence can boost sales of those crafty creations.

The site has been selling less stuff and recently announced a plan to double down on high quality and unique merchandise over

cheap and mass produced. Now it's launching AI curated product collections based on trends like

Island Lux or maximalism. They build on the work of human trend spotters using AI to scan the site

and tag thousands of matching products.

Nick Daniel, chief product officer at Etsy, explains what they're calling alligatorial curation.

We have 130 million listings for sale on Etsy. That means that the most difficult thing for us to do is actually match a buyer

with the thing that they're looking for. And leveraging technology, we're able to actually sift

through all of those listings and really pull out those ones that are really inspiring for

our customers and the ones that spark those new shopping journeys. One of the things that we

learned in gifting last year was people love the ideas that we generated

for our gift guides.

They wanted thousands of listings, and doing that at scale is really difficult.

We think we were there finally being able to get thousands of thousands of topics in front

of you with thousands of

items that are high quality. Tell me more about how Etsy is integrating the large language

model to kind of refine these collections. Yeah, I think the thing that's the most interesting,

I think, on that is how we've leveraged large language models just to know more about

our inventory. That's been a core problem that we've been trying to solve for quite a long time.

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