Mozilla Review Checker to launch in November
Firefox users will be able to shop on key sites in the knowledge that product reviews have been checked for integrity
Mozilla is currently testing its new "Review Checker" and is planning to make it available to all users as part of Firefox 120 for desktop and Android which is scheduled for release on 21st November.
Mozilla acquired Fakespot, an AI powered start-up which grades product reviews for integrity and uses a flagging system to identify fake reviews and dubious sellers, in May this year. The Fakespot technology has now been integrated into Mozilla as a new feature. Mozilla also launched it's own startup for trustworthy AI earlier this year.
The feature will simply be called "Review Checker" and will initially work only on several popular US sites - which will include Amazon.
When visiting these sites via Firefox, users will see a price tag icon displayed at the top of the address bar. When clicked, the user will then be invited to try the Review Checker. If the user chooses to do so, the reviews on the product page will be graded, and all the reliable reviews flagged as such. The shopper can then make a much more informed decision.
Fake reviews have plagued the retail and leisure industry for years now but up until this year the majority of such reviews have been generated by humans who are paid to create multiple posts to help businesses boost their ratings and profiles on platforms like Tripadviser and Amazon. Tripadviser identified 1.3m reviews as fake in 2022, and Google told The Guardian in 2022 that it had blocked or removed an astonishing 115m fake business reviews.
However, with ChatGPT now so widely available, businesses no longer have to go to the trouble of running what amount to digital sweatshops to generate their fake reviews.
Initially, reviews generated by the free LLM in the first quarter of this year weren't too tricky for an eagle-eyed shopper to spot, as many of them began with the phase, ‘As an AI language model…' However, ChatGPT learned quickly to produce far more authentic looking and plausible reviews which big name sites already typically use both automation and human checkers to weed out. But these layers of defence against fakery will invariably struggle against the industrial quantities of fake reviews that ChatGPT and similar tools can plausibly manufacture.
Legislators are aware of the problem. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, presently at the report stage in the Commons, will potentially make it illegal to post fake reviews, and also to host reviews without taking action to validate them. In combination with such legislation, the Mozilla Review Checker, if successful and extended to other popular sites, could prove to be a useful tool for helping consumers make genuinely informed choices.