Fake reviews
Also called fake review, AI-generated reviews
Reviews written by sellers, paid writers, bots or AI to make a product look better, or a rival look worse, than it is.
Reviews became the main way people judge things they can't touch before buying, and so a business in its own right: people paid to post praise, sellers swapping reviews, and bots that inflate star ratings.
Generative AI made fakes nearly free. A model can write hundreds of different, believable reviews in seconds, each in a slightly different voice. The FTC's rule on fake reviews names AI-generated reviews explicitly and lets it seek penalties from businesses that knowingly buy or sell them.
For a reader, that changes the question. "Does this sound real?" stopped working when AI learned to write naturally; "does this pattern look real?" still works.
For example
A new gadget has 400 5-star reviews in 2 weeks, all glowing, all vague, many praising the same feature in almost the same words.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet fake reviews in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
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