Amazon's AI Product Reviews Seen Exaggerating Negative Feedback
Review summaries created by generative artificial intelligence also sometimes mischaracterize products.
A tiny percentage of reviews saying Penn tennis balls smelled were represented in an AI-generated summary.
Photo illustration: 731; Source: Amazon, Getty Images
Shopping on Amazon.com Inc. has long entailed scrolling through pages and pages of often redundant customer feedback. In an effort to make the task less onerous, the company in August began using artificial intelligence to convert billions of reviews into brief summaries consisting of a few sentences apiece.
As is often true with generative AI, the results aren’t perfect. In some cases, the summaries provide an inaccurate description of a product. In others, they exaggerate negative feedback. This has potential implications not just for customers, but for Amazon merchants who depend on positive reviews to boost sales. Making matters worse, merchants say, the summaries were deployed just as they were headed into the crucial holiday shopping season—giving them one more thing to worry about besides inflation-battered shoppers.