Crackdown on Fake Reviews: That Is a Hoot!
July 3, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read “The FTC Wants to Put a Ban on Fake Reviews.” My first reaction was, “Shouldn’t the ever-so-confident Verge poobah have insisted on the word “impose”; specifically, The FTC wants to impose a ban on a fake reviews” or maybe “The FTC wants to rein in fake reviews”? But who cares? The Verge is the digital New York Times and go-to source of “real” Silicon Valley type news.
The write up states:
If you, too, are so very tired of not knowing which reviews to trust on the internet, we may eventually get some peace of mind. That’s because the Federal Trade Commission now wants to penalize companies for engaging in shady review practices. Under the terms of a new rule proposed by the FTC, businesses could face fines for buying fake reviews — to the tune of up to $50,000 for each time a customer sees one.
For more than 30 years, I worked with an individual named Robert David Steele, who was an interesting figure in the intelligence world. He wrote and posted on Amazon more than 5,000 reviews. He wrote these himself, often in down times with me between meetings. At breakfast one morning in the Hague, Steele was writing at the breakfast table, and he knocked over his orange juice. He said, “Give me your napkin.” He used it to jot down a note; I sopped up the orange juice.
“That’s a hoot,” says a person who wrote a product review to make a competitor’s offering look bad. A $50,000 fine. Legal eagles take flight. The laughing man is an image flowing from the creative engine at MidJourney.
He wrote what I call humanoid reviews.
Now reviews of any type are readily available. Here’s an example from Fiverr.com, an Israel-based outfit with gig workers from many countries and free time on their hands:
How many of these reviews will be written by a humanoid? How many will be spat out via a ChatGPT-type system?
What about reviews written by someone with a bone to pick? The reviews are shaded so that the product or the book or whatever is presented in a questionable way? Did Mr. Steele write a review of an intelligence-related book and point out that the author was misinformed about the “real” intel world?
Several observations:
- Who or what is going to identify fake reviews?
- What’s the difference between a Fiverr-type review and a review written by a humanoid motivated by doing good or making the author or product look bad?
- As machine-generated text improves, how will software written to identify machine-generated reviews keep up with advances in the machine-generating software itself?
Net net: External editorial and ethical controls may be impractical. In my opinion, a failure of ethical controls within social structures creates a greenhouse in which fakery, baloney, misinformation, and corrupted content to thrive. In this context, who cares about the headline. It too is a reflection of the pickle barrel in which we soak.
Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2023
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