Beware Amazon AI review summaries

It has no idea what you want to know. It never had and never will.

It's just very clever pattern matching at phenomenal speeds. Which is why it can't be contained or constrained. It has no idea what it is spewing any more than a room full of monkeys taking words from books and making sentences according to rules they have observed.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

It probably has all your Amazon search and purchase history as well as knowing who all your friends are.

Then the AI should have given the same review on each of the apps, but it didn’t.

The AI is more sophisticated than you expected, apparently, but I'm not sure that's sinister. It uses information Amazon holds about you so that it can summarise the information about the product that its programmers have deemed to be most helpful to you.

For example, it may simply provide different summaries for men and women, because on the whole they are more interested in different characteristics of the products. You may feel that is creepy or sexist, but it is no different to a salesman emphasising the durability of the product to the husband and the attractive design to the wife. (Please forgive the stereotypes. It's just an example.)

ITYM ‘most helpful to Amazon’.

Amazon reviews should also be taken with a huge pinch of salt. They lump together reviews from different products and/or from different manufacturers. What you may be reading is a review from something completely different to the item described and the photo above.

I have written a few reviews about good and bad items on sale on Amazon or Amazon marketplace but having known about them lumping together reviews for different, but maybe similar, products I always start my review by stating exactly which product I have purchased, 99.9% of reviewer don't do this.

I also tend to read from the 1 star reviews first especially if there are a large percentage of reviews saying the same thing.

Some men are married to hairy arsed stevedores :-)

I really don't know why Amazon bothered to introduce the system. Perhaps, they found that people were spending ages reading the reviews and then getting distracted from buying?

Repeat after me: It doesn't "know"

Why ? It's trivial to randomize or skew output so no two are the same.

As I said ....

Probably to feed other operations that are using AI to filter reviews.

Look up "Ouroboros" ...

If they are powered by the same pathetic system that powers their search, then there isn't enough salt in the known universe to offset the fail.

If anyone is being pestered by an "AI" snake oil salesperson, then just ask them to "AI" a page of Google results and remove the same crud you would with your boring natural intelligence.

As one said to me "It's not that kind of AI" as he left the building s**te unsold.

Anyone who fended off the big data boys will know the drill ...