In what might be one of the more questionable applications of artificial intelligence to date, Amazon announced Wednesday that it will begin showing AI-generated images of products inside its shopping app based on user search queries. Yes, you read that correctly—a retailer where people shop for tangible, real-world items believes that displaying fabricated photos will somehow "assist" consumers in finding what they need. Enough is enough.

Here’s how Amazon explains the feature in a blog post. Customers may have a specific item in mind but lack the precise vocabulary to describe it in a way that yields useful results. (The examples Amazon provides include terms like "cowl neck" for a shirt style or "rattan" for furniture.)

When someone enters a search query, they’ll see a selection of AI-generated product images beneath their autocomplete suggestions. (Refer to the image above.)

For instance, if you search for a blue gingham dress, you might see several dress variations—short or long sleeves, different lengths, and other differences—appear as visual options. The idea is that clicking one would direct you to search results that better match that style, powered by Amazon’s visual search capabilities. In reality, it’s somewhat absurd for a retailer to invent fake products as a way to guide users toward search results. For starters, it’s potentially misleading—customers who don’t read carefully may think they’re being taken to a page where they can find that exact dress, only to be disappointed when it’s not available. And there’s the fairly obvious question: why would you fabricate product images when you have a website filled with real photographs of actual products—which is presumably what an online shopper actually wants to see?

This feature follows several other attempts by Amazon to integrate AI into its retail site and shopping app, with mixed results. On the more useful side, Amazon already summarizes customer reviews using AI, so you don’t have to read them all to grasp the key pros and cons of a product. More bizarrely, last year it rolled out a short audio product summary feature where AI experts describe a product’s highlights in a podcast-like format. Other recent AI features include AI-generated "shoppable collages" that direct people to curated pages focused on a particular fashion style; Amazon Lens Live, which scans products in a camera’s view to find visual matches; the ability to add text to visual searches; and a Lock Screen visual search widget for iOS. Earlier this month, Amazon also replaced its Rufus AI chatbot with Alexa for Shopping to enable natural language shopping queries via voice and text.