Amazon recommended Gorilla Heavy Duty spray after purchasing Black Hair Products.
I know how it sounds.
Amazon uses AI to present personalized product recommendations to shoppers. Their recommendations come to me like the missing items on a grocery list, where I find myself nodding — oh yeah, that’s what I forgot to purchase. This time, however, after purchasing a cart-load of Afrocentric hair products, Amazon recommended Gorilla Glue.
Yup.
We’re all familiar with the way Netflix recommends movies and shows based on our watch history. Before the use of AI became more commonplace it was almost eerie to receive suggestions without understanding the science behind this obvious sorcery. In the same way, without an understanding of Amazon’s basic algorithms, it’s easy to do a double-take.
Is this recommendation in any way related to my blackness?
Before we end up in a rabbit hole of racially insensitive assumptions driven by AI, let’s decipher a bit of how Amazon’s AI works.
Amazon is practically the inventor of the concept of post-purchase recommendations. They employed an algorithm called “item-based collaborative filtering” to provide a unique home page to every single customer. Their algorithm interprets massive amounts of divergent data in real-time to optimize the browsing experience and increase the potential spending ratio per visit.
As with most common online shopping experiences, after recent purchases, you receive a product recommendation email that states “ We found something we think you might like .”
That’s where the Gorilla Glue pooped in.
The Gorilla Glue may at first seem random, but a dip into trending social and digital media events is almost impossible to evade articles about miss Tessica Brown aka “Gorilla Glue Girl”.
TL;DR
Tessica sprayed her hair with the now flying-off-the-shelves Gorilla glue to receive quite an impenetrable hold that led to a social media plea for help. After going viral and being turned down by medical facilities, she received surgery that restored her hair and scalp. Allegedly.
Following this debacle, Gorilla Glue’s sales skyrocketed, along with the Gorilla Glue challenge which is possibly the dumbest challenge I’ve seen since lockdown. Nonetheless, Gorilla Glue is a hot selling item and can arrive in two days if you have Amazon Prime.
Now back to Amazon.
Amazon’s algorithm uses a combo of browsing history, purchase history, and user behavior to determine which products should take the forefront of your homepage and eventually become the star of that engagement email. The AI takes it steps further to analyze your Prime video viewing preferences and even scroll time and spend data on their Physical stores.
With this knowledge, I did what any other inquisitive data marketing excavator would do — I reviewed my video history.
Over the last week, I viewed Chi-Raq, Flack, Utopia, and The Tick. Seemingly a subtle balance of genres, I guess. I received no recommendations that were in any way movie or series related- but I’m ok with that. Purchase was not likely to happen, which makes perfect AI sense.
Amazon is like an opportunistic person who slips into your DM offering something that you may not have necessarily sought out without that first contact. They’ve viewed your posts and stories. Even perhaps liked a few and now that they have a better idea of your preferences they slide into your DM.
Amazon definitely knows my preferences. As much as I do shop local, there’s still no better feeling than the guaranteed 2 day or same-day arrival of a product I needed immediately. So yes, Amazon has the advantage, and like the crowd, I feed them with information that gives them even more leverage to jump into my DM and then into my pockets.
So where does the Gorilla glue come in?
Amazon’s predictive algorithm plunges far beyond its site. Products like Amazon Echo give granular insight into the type of music we listen to and even our daily schedules, our goals, contact list, shopping list, the books we read — the list goes on. Amazon’s machine learning team then harvests a customer’s shopping activity from their smartphone for continued development.
Connecting this data at different touchpoints helps Amazon provide a more holistic view of our behavior. This provides a simplified, and even partially automated shopping experience.
For example, a shopper can find a recipe using Alexa. Alexa can determine the ingredients needed, add them to the cart and order to be delivered.
Look ma, no hands.
On the surface, it seems like a small price to pay for Amazon essentially collecting the data of our lives. We the general public, however, are still not knowledgeable of the extent to which Amazon collects private information. We just know that they do.
Amazon, did you notice that I read five sequential articles related to Tessica Brown’s demise?
Racial and popularity bias
While artificial intelligence has proven itself to have an issue with race and gender bias, Amazon is working to create a formula that predicts primarily through user behavior and not the assumption thereof. This is unlike facial recognition and other AI habitats that primarily use visual detection to determine outcomes.
It’s still not inhuman to have the visceral urge to expect that at some point racial differences could incur a minor determining factor. It’s the world we live in.
Amazon’s answer is “Personalize”, another machine learning service they’ve recently put into place to overcome recommendation problems, like new users and popularity bias. They’ve determined the importance to interpolate a customer’s needs to produce a more thoughtful display of recommended items — and I’d like to think that they do so minus racial terms.
So while I’m certain I haven’t displayed any behavior that connects me to the potential desire to purchase Gorilla Glue — seems like much of the world has. And popularity trumps probability.
Perhaps their shiny new predictive AI, determined that I in fact do need Gorilla Glue because [ominously] something will be broken next week.
Also, Amazon if you’re listening. I’ve recently been researching coupons for 50% off a new ( not newly refurbished ) Dyson blow dryer.
