Says who? understanding consumer trust in AI-generated reviews
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Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence, including Large Language Models and Generative Pre-Trained Transformers, have started to change the way people shop online. Advancements with LLMs and GPTs have brought AI more deeply into the shopping journey, specifically the research phase. AI-generated review summaries are an early example of how AI can be leveraged to help consumers do more online shopping research and save time by summarizing user reviews. However, no research to date has been done to understand if consumers trust shopping research generated by AI. By looking into how shoppers use online reviews, what makes them trust reviews and which reviews they find credible and then applying those same questions to AI-generated review summaries, this research explored how consumers reacted to AI-generated review summaries. Using the Technology Acceptance Model as a framework, eight in-depth interviews were conducted, along with "shop-alongs," where shoppers explained how reviews fit into their shopping journeys in real time. Participants were then shown AI-generated review summaries and asked to share their perception of the summary and if they found it trustworthy or useful. Shoppers shared their views on what makes a review useful or trustworthy and then applied the same factors to the AI-powered review summaries. While they found the AI summaries to be a useful data point or jumping off point into further research, they all reported feeling that they would continue to do more detailed research on their own. Their lack of trust in the AI-generated summaries resulted in part from not fully understanding how the summary was generated or what it was trained upon. Given the constantly evolving use of AI in online shopping, this research provides direction for how to help consumers trust and use shopping platforms and features that are powered by AI, as well as how e-commerce retailers and platforms should think about positioning AI shopping features.
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M.A.