Researchers Develop AI That Can Write Believable Yelp Reviews

It is often said that word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing, which means that we tend to believe that a product or service is worth checking out if it is usually recommended by someone else, like from a friend, colleague, family member, online reviews, and so on. However it seems that maybe online reviews might not be so trustworthy in the future.

This is thanks to work being done by researchers at the University of Chicago who have managed to develop AI that can actually write believable Yelp reviews. One of the example reviews written by the AI reads, “I love this place. I went with my brother and we had the vegetarian pasta and it was delicious. The beer was good and the service was amazing. I would definitely recommend this place to anyone looking for a great place to go for a great breakfast and a small spot with a great deal.”

Does that not sound somewhat believable to you? The researchers then presented this AI-written reviews to humans who for the most part weren’t able to tell that they were fake, but they also seem to have perceived these reviews as “useful” in the same way had they been written by actual humans.

Of course this development isn’t so much about writing fake reviews, but rather the researchers want to bring to attention the type of “attacks” that we might be able to expect in the future, where business owners could use AI to generate hundreds, if not thousands of fake reviews to attack the competition.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), _cold