Amazon’s chief product officer has gone on record several times saying that “there won’t be a corner cut” when it comes to Amazon’s products, an endeavor that appears to be necessary.
The problem is that this statement has been followed by several rounds of layoffs across the company, and now Amazon is bragging about the arrival of an AI video generator it wants its sellers to use to design advertisements for their products sold on Amazon’s store, and frankly, flooding the store with AI ads generated in five minutes or fewer sounds like the exact opposite of not cutting corners, but a hard lean into it.
Related
How Amazon’s streaming strategy is ruining Prime Video
The ad-filled streaming platform is alienating many users
Amazon thinks AI-generated advertisements are a good idea
What customers have always wanted: fake videos of real products
Amazon has announced that its free AI video generator is now available to US advertisers (via The Verge), which uses AI generation to create videos of the products that sellers are looking to market across Amazon’s store. As you can see in the screenshot above, Amazon is even bragging that six videos (ads) can be generated in minutes, which sure doesn’t scream quality in a world where AI still continually hallucinates across competing services.
So now that Amazon’s reviews are rarely reliable, to the point that a regulator had to get the company to agree to clean up its act in the EU, Amazon users will soon have to contend with AI-generated videos advertising the products they are browsing with no real way to know if what they are viewing is real, or the fever dream of AI, or the calculated plans of a scammer selling a fake product.
On the flip side, the AI video generator Amazon is offering to sellers should make quick work of whipping up news ads, thanks to new features that make it even easier to see a product in motion, like a watch on an arm. Supposedly, the AI videos will cap out at 21 seconds, with six options to choose from. Sellers can even upload their own real videos to have Amazon’s AI tool condense them down to something more marketable. So, from a seller’s standpoint, the ability to create ads with ease is surely a welcome one.
Ideally, Amazon’s new AI-generated video ads will be so good that users won’t be able to tell the difference compared to a video recorded of a real product, but it’s still hard to see how AI advertisements will help to repair Amazon’s reputation. The path seems clear, and further down the slippery slope we fall. AI isn’t making things better; it’s seemingly making things worse.