Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
You don’t need AI for that. All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org and a discoverable price list page that can be read and understood by everyone.
We already had something similar with RSS, where you subscribe to your favorite blogs and forums, and the RSS reader on your computer would tell you which sites have new posts, so you don’t need to scan all of them each day. For some reason people stopped using RSS, and instead published their stuff (or notifications about new posts) on Facebook, twitter etc.
The same system could be adapted for (grocery-) price lists. However the big brands would never do that, because then it would be very easy to discover which products suddenly got more expensive.
All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org
Which is the problem AI is solving here - getting every supermarket chain to agree on this (when it’s actually against their interests to do so, since it increases price transparency) would be an impossible task, but AI can get around this requirement with minimal extra effort.
I’m hardly an AI evangelist, but this is actually one of the rare situations where it’s a good fit.
This would be a bad approach, because you are essentially trying to brute force your way around a roadblock (no supported open data format) the supermarket intentionally designed. It would be easy for them to block your bot with Captchas, rate limits or IP blocking or just sue you.