Can AI product review summaries help us make better purchase decisions?
Can AI product review summaries help us make better purchase decisions?
Amazon is sprinkling AI dust on its product review system. This week, the company launched artificial intelligence-generated “review summaries” on its mobile app, leveraging the technology behind chatbots to analyze and synthesize oodles of comments into one nice, tidy paragraph. But can bots help us make better buying decisions?
Lately I have had a bit of an ant problem in my apartment. And as with just about every purchase I make, I will not rest until I find the best ant-abatement product.
The top two contenders on Amazon — a Marketplace underwriter — have more than 100,000 reviews, and I’m not about to read them all.
Enter AI review summary:
"Customers like the appearance and performance of the ant bait. That said, some complain about the stickiness."“I think it actually would be very helpful,” said Anastasiya Ghosh, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona who studies consumer decision-making online.
She said people gravitate toward products with the most reviews, regardless of the rating, and then usually just read the top few.
“If AI can do it for us, right, and read through all of them, it might actually mitigate some of the biases that I find in my work where consumers overweight the most recent text review,” Ghosh said.
But getting the CliffsNotes on comments is only helpful when they’re actually authentic, said Brett Hollenbeck, a marketing professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“The current system of reviews is sort of fundamentally broken,” he said.
Hollenbeck said it’s common for sellers to pay for fake reviews, which are even easier to generate with AI chatbots, and Amazon’s new summary generator might not know the difference. “This is immediately going to be a target for sellers to manipulate.”
Unless, he said, the algorithm can weed out the fakes.
As for my anti-ant mission, maybe I’ll try the old sugar and baking soda trick before I bring in the AI.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
