Are robots writing fake product reviews?

I have posted alot about products and services that have something fake about them and also posted about robots in the economy. So it was interesting to see an article that combined both themes.

See Can You Tell Whether This Headline Was Written by a Robot? Not this time, but AI is churning out articles, illustrations, fake product reviews and even videos by Christopher Mims of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"You probably haven’t noticed, but there’s a good chance that some of what you’ve read on the internet was written by robots. And it’s likely to be a lot more soon.

Artificial-intelligence software programs that generate text are becoming sophisticated enough that their output often can’t be distinguished from what people write. And a growing number of companies are seeking to make use of this technology to automate the creation of information we might rely on, according to those who build the tools, academics who study the software, and investors backing companies that are expanding the types of content that can be auto-generated."

"AI content services are thriving. They make content creators more productive, but they also are able to produce content that no one can tell was made by a machine."

"The rise of AI-generated content is made possible by a phenomenon known variously as computational creativity, artificial creativity or generative AI."

"Here are a few examples of the coming bounty of synthetic media: Artists, marketers and game developers are already using services like Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to create richly detailed illustrations in the style of different artists, as well as photo-realistic flights of fancy. Researchers at the Meta AI division of Facebook parent Meta Platforms unveiled in September a system that can automatically generate videos from a text prompt, and Google unveiled what appears to be an even more sophisticated version of such a system in October."

[there is a] "a system that can write newspaper articles in the style of any paper fed into their software."

"Automatic text-generation systems are helping novelists speed up their writing process, powering customer service chatbots, and powering a service, Replika, that hundreds of thousands of people treat as their artificial boyfriend or girlfriend—and with whom many say they’ve fallen in love.

One downside of this type of artificial creativity is the potential erosion of trust. Take online reviews, where AI is exacerbating deceptive behavior. Algorithmically generated fake reviews are on the rise on Amazon and elsewhere"

"While most fraudulent reviews are still written by humans, about 20% are written by algorithms"

See Walgreens Turns to Prescription-Filling Robots to Free Up Pharmacists to get a list of the many posts I have done about robots.

See You can hire someone to do the job interview for you to get a list of the many posts I have done about fake products and services.