Amazon has a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool that takes customer preferences into account and generates predictions around what it thinks it knows about their individual interests.
The tool, called “About You,” is part of Alexa for Shopping, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant. It builds a profile of each customer from five sources: their conversations with the assistant, product reviews, purchase history, Amazon Lists, and searches. While the tool was released in May, it’s now gaining traction after some online users started posting about some of the more outrageous assumptions made by the tool.
One user, named Megan Montgomery, took to Threads after she posted a screenshot displaying her “About You” page from Amazon. Most of the predictions are fairly lacklustre: She owns a Kindle, she shops in the women’s department, and probably owns a Shark robot vacuum.
But at the bottom of the screenshot, under product preferences, Amazon infers that she “has flat buttocks.”
“I stumbled upon a page of assumptions that Amazon has made about me based on my purchases and I’m literally speechless,” the user wrote on Threads.
Meanwhile, a user on X posted how she made a series of unhinged searches using Amazon’s shopping AI. The result? Her dog “has a Glock 40” and “Dog is highly trained in the use of a Glock 40.”
The Internet, in turn, is doing what the internet does best: Skewering Amazon and dogpiling onto the tool’s more bizarre findings.
“Very low IQ generalisations of my preferences based heavily on a few purchases,” one Reddit user wrote. “Looks like if I gave AI my last five years of Amazon purchases and told it to make some broad generalisations about me.”
Another Reddit user quipped: “Under food and nutrition mine says ‘likes salami'”.
There’s no way to opt out of the feature entirely. Customers can, however, edit their page by adding details they want Amazon to know and deleting assumptions they find inaccurate or too personal.
For what it’s worth, Amazon’s read on this author was pretty clear and, luckily, not too damning. Top of my list? “Practices yoga or pilates regularly.” Good thing I don’t buy my wine from Amazon. – Inc./Tribune News Service
