Will AI end up making us all give the same Christmas gifts? That's the risk, given that more and more people are using chatbots to find ideas
In recent years, more and more people seem to be turning to chatbots for gift ideas, especially ahead of Christmas. This is also supported by a recent survey conducted by the multinational payments company Mastercard in collaboration with the market research firm The Harris Poll, which involved over 9,000 adults across several countries worldwide.
The survey reveals that four in ten Gen Z and Millennial respondents would trust a chatbot's suggestions more than their own judgment when choosing a gift for a loved one, because they believe AI knows them well enough to interpret their tastes. Among those under 45, moreover, more than 30% of respondents say they also use AI to write greeting cards.
Underlying these choices appear to be primarily practical reasons, rather than curiosity about new technologies. For many people, AI is above all a tool for saving time and reducing the stress associated with searching for gifts during the holiday season. In this sense, chatbots seem to be particularly useful for keeping budgets in check and shopping more mindfully.
Why do chatbot responses look so alike?
If a growing number of people turn to chatbots for gift ideas in the future, is there a risk that the suggestions they receive will all start to look the same? Language models are trained on enormous amounts of data and tend to generate the statistically most likely responses, favouring solutions that reflect the most recurring trends. This phenomenon is known among experts as "mode collapse" and, in the case of gifts, could translate into a rather tangible effect: different people asking chatbots generic questions might receive very similar, if not identical, lists of suggestions.
Some evidence of this tendency comes from a study conducted in 2025 by the University of Washington in the United States, which examined the responses provided by various language models to around 26,000 open-ended questions for which there is no single correct answer — such as finding an original gift idea. The researchers identified two trends: on one hand, each model tends to produce fairly similar responses when asked the same type of question; on the other, even chatbots developed by different companies often end up suggesting surprisingly similar solutions.
The problem with asking chatbots for certain kinds of advice
creativity needs fresh experiences. you can’t keep feeding your mind the same scenery and expect endless inspiration.
— Otis (@brianxotis) November 8, 2026
When relying on chatbots, the risk of different users ending up with the same gift can be real, but it is not inevitable. Furthermore, as the Mastercard research points out, although many consumers are willing to turn to artificial intelligence systems for gift suggestions, the vast majority of respondents say they do not want to hand over control of the final purchasing decision to technology.
A similar phenomenon already occurs with travel itineraries suggested by chatbots, which often end up coinciding with the most popular routes online — it can happen, for example, that among the recommended restaurants some are very heavily frequented, which in certain respects then tends to fuel overtourism.
The most realistic scenario at present is that gift idea suggestions generated by artificial intelligence systems will continue to be used largely in a "hybrid" way — that is, as a starting point for identifying a few ideas (at least according to the default settings of individual chatbots), which are then subjected to human evaluation.
