5mo ago

Amazon and AI

Mastodon Toot.

22 comments

I don't even buy from Amazon anymore. The fact that everything I want to buy has 4.5 stars or higher is already suspicious. I've seen reviews for stuff that aren't even related to the product along with garbled reviews that were obviously generated by AI. I'd rather just go to the store than trust anything on Amazon. And none of this even scratches the surface when you realize Amazon sells things that are straight up dangerous. From faulty fuses that could burn your house down to auto cleaning litter boxes that will kill your cat. All from drop shipping companies you can barely pronounce.
Edit: Oh yeah and don't forget Amazon bribes people with gift cards to make positive reviews and they delete negative reviews. You literally can't trust anything on the entire site anymore.
- I stopped using Amazon when it became impossible to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that what I am buying is coming from a legit business because of drop shipping, review scamming, and other shit they do.
  If I wanted cheap, Chinese-made garbage I'd use Temu or Wish and get the thing for three cents instead of thirty dollars.
- I only look at 1 star reviews for that reason and decide if the problem those people have if relevant for me or in general
  
  So many 1 star reviews are obviously a result of those people either not understanding the product, or not using it as intended. Then there are the weird reviews that give praise, but have 1 star. The stars on their own aren't worth much. You've gotta read what was written.
- I've not bought anything from Amazon for close to 3 years when I was handed a gift card out of the blue. It took me no less than three hours to shop for 5 pretty standard items because on every page I clicked, my screen was entirely filled with ridiculously trashy products, annoyingly unrelated products, upselling BS and useless AI-generated reviews. And then I had to uncheck the fucking subscriptions they snuck in. How does anyone bear with this, I wonder?

Garbage in (reviews) Garbage out. It's stupid to create summaries of product reviews with AI because it only takes a few joke reviews to spoil the whole data.

Wait what? AI generated reviews? Please tell me this is a joke? What the fuck is the point of that? In an ideal scenario I want to read about what experience a buyer has with a product. I already expect at the bare minimum of half of the reviews to be fake. Why would you admit you absolutely shouldn't trust any of them?
- From the bit we can see of the screenshot, I think he means the AI generated summary of the reviews. So not really a review itself.
  
  Particularly since summarizing text is something that llms are actually decent at, it makes sense to use them for that. They're unreliable at generating new content, but asking for a description of text that's just below it is reasonable.
  
  Ok that makes a bit more sense on the surface
- The point is that some VP probably pushed for the use of AI, and a director and senior manager chasing promotion decided to deliver it, despite there being no clear use for customers.
- Fake Amazon reviews is a service you can buy to boost your product. Using genAI is an obvious move for these providers. Makes it harder for Amazon to find the fakes, because they can generate more content variety.
  When you run a botnet for such a service, you can't only put 5 star reviews on your client's products. You want a variety of usage pattern modifiers to stay below the radar. Putting reviews on semi-random products is one technique.
- I suspect the inention of the bot is to summarize the reviews of "real" people, but yeah, certainly doesnt seem immune to hallucinating