
AI trained on Yelp data writes fake reviews ‘indistinguishable’ from real thing - rbanffy
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/31/16232180/ai-fake-reviews-yelp-amazon
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dfraser992
Classification of reviews as fake or authentic is my MSc dissertation, so I
thought I'd point out a few things. I have not read the paper referenced in
the article yet, though. The article seems fine, given it's a pop-sci sort of
thing.

a) Humans are generally pretty incompetent at determining if a review is fake
or not, so my opinion is it is a crude yardstick at best.

b) I personally don't think using AMT as a source of subjects is a great idea
unless care is taken to deliberately take into account psychological/social
type factors - using AMT sort of turns your research into a psych focused one
as well (unless you control who is in your pool of workers consciously and
deliberately)

The important point I think is that they have gotten to the point where neural
nets etc can generate readable text that obviously isn't computer-generated,
and so can fool the typical or casual reader. My research is showing promising
results for using ensembles to classify reviews, and the state of the art
systems use more than just the text which make them fairly useful. But there
will certainly be an arms race.

I am more terrified of the advances made in faking video and speech - when
that really kicks off, Facebook will have to have _so many_ AI systems
examining every bit of data "people" put into it.

