Shopping on Amazon Is About to Get Worse.
I don’t need to tell you that Amazon’s search results are getting worse and worse— every major publication on Earth has already done so . Last week, Amazon announced plans to use artificial intelligence-powered jet fuel to help fight this fire.
In my experience, Amazon is full of products with confusing descriptions and lack of complete specifications. Now the website AlternativeTo reports that Amazon recently added a tool for sellers that allows them to use AI to create such product listings. Specifically, any vendor hoping to sell a product to Amazon can simply provide a link to a product page elsewhere on the Internet—the AI system will crawl the page and populate the product page for the seller. To quote Amazon’s press release :
This will further improve and simplify the process of creating product listings, saving our selling partners more time and effort in developing Amazon store listings that are engaging to customers and help drive sales.
If you’ve ever looked at the top search results on Amazon and thought, “Wow, I really wish the company selling this would put less effort into their product descriptions,” then I guess you might care. However, everyone else should expect even more of that eerie feeling when browsing Amazon. You know one thing: you’re a human trying to navigate a system optimized by and for bots.
To be clear, I have no doubt that this kind of auto-fill could be useful for several legitimate companies. Data entry is annoying, and in many cases a tool like this could probably make people’s lives a little easier, as long as they go back and edit the data to ensure accuracy. Good actors will probably gain a little. Having said that, I can’t help but imagine bad actors benefiting even more. It will be extremely beneficial for spam companies to upload even more of the effortless junk that is already clogging Amazon search results.
What should a potential buyer do? We talked a little about how to improve your Amazon search results , and you can also use another search service to search on Amazon . Such skills and tools will become increasingly important as AI fills more and more of the Internet with “content.” Good luck there.