Dive Brief:
- Amazon is using generative artificial intelligence to summarize customer reviews for its customers, the online retail giant announced Monday.
- The customer review highlight feature will use AI to synthesize customer reviews into a short paragraph on the product page detailing information about the item. The tool will only feature reviews from verified purchases, according to the announcement.
- The company is piloting the tool for select U.S. mobile customers across various products. It will expand the tool across more categories and offer the feature to more customers in the coming months, per the release.
Dive Insight:
Amazon said that 125 million customers wrote 1.5 billion reviews last year. The company’s new AI-generated review will feature key product insights and allow customers to surface reviews that mention certain product attributes, allowing them to understand common themes.
“We are always pushing for as many honest and trustworthy reviews, free of influence or manipulation, as possible,” Vaughn Schermerhorn, director of community shopping at Amazon, said in a company blog post. “Honest reviews provide customers with the information they need to make confident purchase decisions.”
The company said it uses expert investigators as well as machine learning models to analyze data to spot fake reviews, such as sign-in activity, relationships with other accounts and review history. “We continue to invest significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews,” Schermerhorn said.
In the past, the company said it halted more than 200 million suspected fake reviews before other customers could see them.
In addition to blocking fake reviews on its platform, Amazon has taken action against counterfeit reviewers elsewhere. In July 2022, the company filed a lawsuit against administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that were allegedly coordinating to publish false reviews and exchange for free items or cash.
Earlier this year, a government agency stepped in to hold a company accountable for its reviews on Amazon’s website. In April, the Federal Trade Commission approved a final consent order against The Bountiful Company for publishing fake reviews on Amazon’s website, marking the first case in which the FTC has regulated the "review hijacking" technique. The agency accused Bountiful Company of posting excessive reviews and product ratings, higher than average ratings and “#1 Best Seller” and “Amazon Choice” badges, according to the agency’s announcement. The FTC ordered Bountiful to pay $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers and barred the company from making similar misrepresentations or using deceptive review tactics to deceive shoppers.
