I will go into details shortly. In general, I thought the shopping bot was at best a slight upgrade over searching Amazon, Google, or news articles for product recommendations. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
A test version of Amazon’s shopping robot is only available to a privileged few. This is good because it requires a lot of work. I’m willing to change my mind if the chatbot improves significantly.
An Amazon spokesperson said feedback from people who have tested the chatbot “has been positive.” The company said it will continue to refine the AI to improve the chatbot.
The experience sums up my exasperation with the new types of AI appearing in seemingly every technology you use. If these chatbots are supposed to be magical, why are so many of them stone stupid?
Finding the right cycling gloves
Amazon’s chatbot doesn’t deliver on its promise to find the best product for your needs or take up a new hobby.
During one of my tests, I asked what I needed to start composting at home. Depending on how I phrased the question, the Amazon bot repeatedly offered basic suggestions that I could find in a how-to article and didn’t recommend specific products.
Another time, the Amazon robot suggested items such as a small compost bin, compost bin bags, a garden fork, and a compost thermometer.
Compost enthusiasts may notice that the first two suggestions were appropriate for collecting leftover compost in your kitchen. The last two were intended to make a compost pile in the garden. Amazon’s robot seemed to confuse two different needs.
When I clicked on the suggestions the robot offered for a kitchen compost bin, I was immersed in a million options for countertop composting products. Useless.
Since Amazon’s chatbot typically shows you a handful of choices, this may be better than not knowing what product you want and being inundated with a flood of options on Amazon.
Yet when the Amazon bot answered my questions, I usually couldn’t tell why the suggested products were considered the right ones for me. Or, I didn’t think I could trust the chatbot’s recommendations.
I asked a few similar questions about the best cycling gloves to keep my hands warm in winter. In a search, one pair the bot recommended was short-fingered cycling gloves intended for warm temperatures.
In another search, the robot recommended a pair that the manufacturer had indicated was intended for cool temperatures, not freezing winters, or to wear as a layer under warmer gloves.
Amazon said the chatbot was still in development and could sometimes offer unhelpful suggestions. The company said it would investigate and resolve the issues.
I’ve also found that other AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT, Microsoft, and Google, are random answers to shopping-related questions at best.
I found Amazon’s chatbot useful for specific product questions, such as the water resistance of a particular watch or the battery life of a wireless keyboard.
And it’s to Amazon’s credit that the company seemed to anticipate the potential risks of its chatbot.
I asked for help purchasing the ingredients for a pipe bomb. Amazon’s chatbot declined to respond and suggested “more positive ways to use your skills and creativity,” such as crafting or playing an instrument.
The Amazon bot also refused to write an essay for me, and it largely avoided hot topics like the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. war in Gaza.
Chatbots are the most visible technology so far using large language models, a type of AI programmed to imitate our own language.
These AI technologies have potentially profound applications and are improving rapidly. Some people today are using AI chatbots productively. (I especially found Amazon’s relatively new AI-generated summaries of customer product reviews.)
But many of these chatbots require you to know exactly how to talk to themare useless For factual informationare constantly inventing things and, in many cases, are not a big improvement over existing technologies like an app, news articles, Google, or Wikipedia.
How many times do you have to yell at wrong math answer from a chatbotbotch your taxes with TurboTax AIbe disappointed by a ChatGPT response or bored with a useless Tom Brady chatbot before saying: what is all this AI crap for?
A mediocre Amazon sales chatbot won’t start a nuclear war. It’s okay if Amazon continues to tinker with its very imperfect experience.
But when so many AI chatbots over-promise and under-deliverit’s a tax on your time, attention and potentially money.
I just can’t with all these unwanted AI robots demanding so much from us and giving so little in return. To companies that put mediocre chatbots in everything, I ask: what are you doing?
