We've all long suspected that Amazon is trying to do our thinking for us, right? This year I was worried that experts in our fields, like me and the DCW team – with our first-hand experiences – were about to be pushed aside. So I tried the 'Rufus' – the Amazon AI beta. Now I'm not so worried! In fact I'm very confident our carefully researched Black Friday deals are the way to go!
We've all got theories about the algorithmic databases being built up that know us and our needs better than we know ourselves, and about the products in the entire near-infinite store they keep like a magical shopkeeper.
From my test, what I can say for sure is that, if Rufus (who, one can only imagine, is a good friend of Alexa's) may have been listening, crawling the web, and building a massive database but, if so, Rufus doesn't know what it means.
Let me explain. The first thing I did was see if my work looking for good deals on drones for my live drones deals guide was a wasted effort? All I want is a good price on a worthwhile drone, so I ask Rufus (which you have to do from the Amazon app on your phone) "Cheap drone deals?"
(Some might say you need to be more polite to a bot, but, until sentience is proven, I'm inclined to disagree).
Right on the answer page I see a picture of the wrong drone (the Ryze Tello has a pic of a different drone) but, hey, perhaps that's just one bit of bad data...
Interestingly Rufus, however, didn't actually seem to want to be answering such commercial questions. It was suggesting a ton of the kind of questions that, as the actual expert with real experience, I should have been even more worried about. Sure – access to the Amazon database SHOULD help find low prices, but how can it expect to tell me what is safe? So, I decided to let it show me what it could do...
Ok, so question answering is really interesting, in that the answers I got were between vague and unhelpful, a aggressively product linked. There is no way, for example, that a battery pack is a safety feature, yet here it is. Nor, really, is a propellor guard for one type of drone if you own a different one – they won't be compatible – yet Rufus has made this decision for me.
That's interesting too, since we're looking at essentially discontinued tech. A good shopkeeper would be recommending the DJI Neo as safer (it has better guards built right in, and is essentially brand new.
Sadly my continued clicking around didn't make things any better, nor even really find me any better drone deals – I couldn't find ONE effective search!
I DID discover that you could ask plain text questions from the off and get even more vague (non-product-filled) advice, and I don't know what data the system was trained on, but it was non-specific to the point of useless. I was a little surprised to read, for example, that I should be looking for carbon fibre drones anywhere beyond budget. Tell that to the Mavic 3 Pro!
For 2024 at least – and I suspect a long while yet – you're definitely going to be a lot better off asking a human rather than getting generalisations from a machine trained, in large part, on promotional material.
Course I would say that, I'm a human. Amazon says it's great!
