TechCrunch: “Earlier this year, Mozilla acquired Fakespot, a startup that leverages AI and machine learning to identify fake and deceptive product reviews. Now, Mozilla is launching its first LLM (large language model) with the arrival of Fakespot Chat, an AI agent that will help consumers as they shop online by answering questions about the product or even suggesting questions that could be useful in your product research. There’s some irony in using AI to combat the scourge of fake reviews, which are today also often crafted using AI technology, like GPT. As CBNC reported in April, a number of Amazon product reviews were transparently created via ChatGPT as they began with the phrase “As an AI language model,” which tends to be part of ChatGPT’s responses. In July, TripAdvisor told The Guardian it had already removed over 20,000 reviews it believed contained AI-generated text from across more than 15,000 properties in its system. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has also proposed a rule that would attempt to ban fake product reviews, warning that AI is making the problem even worse.  

But Fakespot has been using AI, including generative AI technologies, to make the online shopping process more trustworthy, not less. For instance, it launched a generative AI feature called Pros and Cons last year, that could replace the need for reading reviews by writing up its own summaries of a product’s positives and negatives. The feature was trained on billions of data points, with the model itself using five different models under its hood, the company said…”