Amazon’s AI is dumb as dirt
Published by marco on
I saw a badge in my Amazon interface when I was cleaning up some lists. I thought it might have been a notification that something on my wishlist was available as a good price. That would have been helpful!
Instead, I saw the screenshot below.
For a second, I was excited to see that Sapkowski might have published another Witcher book but that’s not what was happening. What was happening was that Amazon was trying to fool me into buying a book that I already owned again. Either they are deliberately trying to scam me, or the AI systems that they have—three years into what is supposed to have been an earth-shattering revolution—are incapable of determining when it makes sense to “buy again”—paper towels, butter, etc.—and when it makes absolutely no sense to “buy again”—an E-book.
This is just another example that illustrates that the argument against AI is not against the technology or its current abilities. It is against how it is likely to be used. We are told that it, like so many technological revolutions before it, will make everyone’s lives better. That cannot be its purpose in our system. It will make a few people’s lives better. It will make Jeff Bezos richer because he can now have AIs come up with schemes for tricking me into buying something they literally don’t need—all without paying anything to anyone.
I know that there are those who don’t understand the previous two paragraphs because they can’t understand how anyone could be upset about this behavior on a web page. They will think that this is just how the world works. They are incapable of even imagining a world in which you’re not constantly fighting scams that seek to claw away your value without returning any of its own. This is legalized theft, a war of attrition against an entire population that will eventually make a mistake, yielding to human fatigue, a weakness to which its attacker is incapable of succumbing.