Amazon plans to start using AI to show summaries of user reviews over on its website.
The AI-produced mini product write-ups will take a look at the complaints and compliments repeated across reviews to provide a potted conclusion, and let those with little time avoid excess scrolling.
“The new AI-powered feature provides a short paragraph right on the product detail page that highlights the product features and customer sentiment frequently mentioned across written reviews,” says Amazon.
It’s not just there to avoid you having to actually read any of the actual reviews. The summaries will also offer category links to help filter out reviews by whether they talk about a specific element, like performance or streaming features.
These will naturally vary by product type. Amazon’s example cites an “LG 3D smart TV”, which is an odd choice given LG no longer sells 3D TVs.
Amazon’s AI reviews are not in the UK just yet. They will soon be “available to a subset of mobile shoppers in the US,” according to Amazon, but seem likely to roll out to other territories short of a test market disaster.
Are Amazon reviews real?
The question is whether this implementation will at times see AI being used to summarise “user” reviews that were themselves merely written by an AI chatbot.
“We continue to invest significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews,” says Amazon. “This includes machine-learning models that analyse thousands of data points to detect risk.”
This isn’t a fight Amazon has won yet, though. CNBC reported earlier this year that many AI-generated Amazon user reviews were making it through this apparently rigorous process, despite starting with the giveaway phrase “as an AI language model”.
Amazon bloggers are also reportedly sent products by manufacturers to bolster the number of reviews on-site. While these are not fake reviews as such, the writers here are motivated by getting free products and, according to some reports, Amazon gift cards.
No form of compensation for writing reviews, including “cash, discounts, free products, gift cards, and refunds,” is allowed, according to Amazon’s own guidelines.
Amazon’s Vine initiative does let select users receive free products in exchange for reviews, though. Manufacturers pay Amazon to be part of this programme.
Amazon’s own use of AI here should, in theory, be able to avoid one of the key issues of today’s chatbots: purely making stuff up. This is because its remit, and the set of data it will use, is limited and finite. It is ultimately a natural evolution of Amazon’s current system, which already lets you filter by reviews that mention certain attributes.
