In April, I wrote about a mysterious new “restaurant review” website in which a “critic” was publishing hundreds of lists of Texas’ best places to eat. The website, which could not be traced to a real owner or author, appeared to be AI-generated. The reviews were robotic clickbait with phrases like “a chilled glass of cocktail.”
Smart readers asked if well-known websites like Yelp and Google are next to be overtaken by bots. We now have an answer: yes.
This week, I’ve found hundreds of obviously fake, AI-generated restaurant reviews on Google Maps in the Dallas area. As the fake reviews proliferate, it’s becoming clear that casual diners trying to find a good meal are going to need to use all of their critical reading skills to navigate an automated web of deception.
Example: I recently heard about a new Syrian restaurant in Richardson called Old Damascus. I thought about going for lunch, so I visited Google Maps reviews to look at photos and see if the reviewers had a favorite lunch wrap. Google’s top review, by real person Samantha Moon Barakat, set the stage: “Not sure what’s going on with the Google reviews of this place. Most appear to be fake which is a little weird.” (She likes the falafel sandwich and tabbouleh, by the way.)
She wasn’t joking. When I counted, at least 110 of the 183 reviews appeared fake, because the writing sounds robotic, the authors don’t mention a single detail about the restaurant, and the accounts have never reviewed anything else in the...
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