Incident 330: “Amazon’s Choice” Algorithm Failed to Recommend Functional Products and Prone to Review Manipulation

Description: Amazon’s “Amazon’s Choice” algorithm recommended poor-quality defective products and were reportedly susceptible to manipulation by inauthentic reviews.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Amazon users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
330
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2016-12-15
Editors
Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

“Amazon’s Choice” Does Not Necessarily Mean A Product Is Good
buzzfeednews.com · 2019

Amazon has said that it is “investing heavily” in ways to detect and prevent inauthentic reviews, as well as removing selling privileges from sellers that list different products on the same listing, which is against Amazon’s rules. Still, …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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