Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

With the rise of Internet sales and the eventual explosion of online reviews, a strong correlation has been formed between online restaurant ratings and business revenue.  For many restaurateurs, favorable reviews translate to better revenue and a stronger bottom line. However, the seedy side of the Web has also led to fake reviews of everything from bullion to bison. Now comes word that researchers at the University of Chicago have successfully taught a neural network to write realistic fake restaurant reviews. 

The idea was to see if a machine could learn to create malicious negative (or glowing) reviews to either kill or inflate online ratings. The results were startling. Humans were unable to differentiate between the machine generated and human-generated reviews.  With these new-age "ghost writers" now pushing commerce, one has to wonder if good taste is a thing of the past. Literally. Cartoon by Ed Hall.