This morning, Amazon announced that it will use generative AI to help customers understand what other customers are saying about a product without having to read through numerous customer reviews.
The retailer stated that this technology will be implemented by providing a short paragraph of text on the product detail page that will highlight the product features and customer sentiments from the customer reviews.
Amazon provides a way to quickly get an overall sense of the common themes across the reviews. Customers can click on buttons to see reviews that mention specific product attributes, such as “ease of use” or “performance.”
Amazon already provides shoppers with frequently-used words found in reviews as clickable buttons.
Expending Categories
Amazon is continuously expanding its highlights feature to include additional categories as it makes the feature more accessible to customers. However, the effectiveness of AI summaries depends on the data they consume.
Amazon has had a long history of fake and deceitful product reviews, even paid reviews, which the company acknowledged in 2021 when it revealed that it had blocked 200 million fake reviews the prior year.
Legal Actions on Fake Customer Reviews
For years, Amazon has taken legal and other actions to combat the sources of fake reviews, such as suing sellers who purchase fake reviews. Last year, Amazon also filed a lawsuit against the admins of 10,000 Facebook groups involved in fake review brokering.
The FTC recently took action against a supplement maker, forcing them to pay $600K for hijacking Amazon reviews.
This occurs when multiple products are combined into one listing to artificially boost the reviews of one product with the reviews of another.
As Artificial Intelligence advances, it becomes increasingly difficult to spot fraudulent reviews as they sound more and more human. This could lead to a surge of fake reviews.
If Amazon does not have other methods of preventing AI-generated customer reviews from appearing on its site, it could reduce the usefulness of its AI-powered summaries of customer reviews.
Nonetheless, Amazon has already stated that it will only include summaries of reviews from verified purchases. Additionally, it is actively investing considerable resources to prevent fake reviews.
The retailer notes that their fraud-detection process includes machine learning models that analyze thousands of data points to identify risk, such as relations to other accounts, sign-in activity, review history, and other indications of suspicious behavior.
In addition, expert investigators use sophisticated fraud-detection tools to analyze and prevent fake reviews from appearing in their store.
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