AI-fication of Amazon reviews

However we’ve recently talked about that situation when many employees have been dismissed, you can read it here:

Nevertheless, today we’ll see how AI and Large Language Models can help to improve users’ experience, all thanks to Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

Amazon confirmed that it would begin to use generative AI to assist customers in better understanding what customers are saying about a product without having to wade through dozens of individual reviews. The new technology will be used to display a short paragraph of text on the product detail page that highlights the product characteristics and consumer sentiment stated in the customer reviews. According to Amazon, this piece of text can be utilized to obtain a better understanding of the common themes running across the evaluations.

In addition to the summary text, Amazon will highlight essential product features as clickable buttons. For example, if a consumer was interested in the product’s “ease of use” or “performance,” they might click a button to see only the reviews that used those phrases. This function may help to provide a better user experience and shorten the time of scrolling all the reviews.

However, in 2021, Amazon acknowledged blocking 200 million fraudulent reviews. The company has also attempted to crack down on the origins of bogus reviews for years through litigation and other steps, including punishing vendors who purchased fake reviews.

It also sued the administrators of 10,000 Facebook groups who were involved in phony review brokering last year.

With AI’s developing capabilities, false reviews may become even more difficult to detect as the technology evolves to sound more human, perhaps leading to another wave of falsified reviews. If Amazon doesn’t have alternative ways to prevent AI-written reviews off its site, this would affect Amazon’s AI-powered review summaries and make them less useful.