Food, hobbies & everyday life · Topic hub
AI that makes the things we eat, buy, explore, watch, play with, and wonder about more interesting—or simply less frustrating.
The useful question
What we watch for
Briefs in this topic
In a randomized field experiment on a major short-video platform, a celebrity sleep-reminder campaign shown between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. increased late-night usage 14.75% and overall platform usage 2.18%, with elevated usage persisting for weeks after the campaign ended.
In a 117,304-session randomized field experiment at a European fashion retailer, checkout prompts about the environmental cost of returns reduced return shipments 2.6% without hurting sales; an AI targeting model suggested a 5.19% reduction versus no nudging by prompting only the shoppers most likely to respond.
In a six-day randomized field experiment with 12,635 new users on an Indian mobile-commerce app, a bilingual Hindi-English chatbot increased purchase odds by up to 87% but also raised uninstall hazard by about 76%, with the downside concentrated in more complex purchases.
In seven randomized field experiments on a cross-border ecommerce platform, GenAI improved sales in most workflows; the strongest pre-sale chatbot raised sales 16.3% and conversion 21.7%, and the positive deployments together implied about $5 in annual value per consumer.
In a randomized field experiment on a leading livestream selling platform, giving shoppers an AI assistant increased sales by 3.00% and cut product return rates by 12.55%, suggesting better answers during checkout can reduce uncertainty instead of merely pushing more purchases.
A model trained on 2,216 recipes designed two burgers that 101 blind tasters rated as highly as or higher than an original Big Mac for flavor, texture, or overall liking.
Machine learning paired with fast spectroscopy separated authentic oils from adulterated samples at industrial scale.
An AI-guided survey helped archaeologists confirm 303 new figurative geoglyphs in Peru in only six months of fieldwork.
BirdNET turned a phone recording into a global bird-identification tool—and millions of ordinary walks into useful ecological observations.
Machine learning revealed a richer structure in sperm-whale click patterns—without pretending we can translate what the whales are saying.
A deep-learning system compared early charge patterns across battery types and conditions to make more transferable lifespan predictions.
