Everyone Has Opinions, Even AI

In mid-2020, the computer science team of Keith Carlson, Allen Riddell and Dan Rockmore was stuck on a problem. The computer code they had developed to write product reviews was working beautifully. But they were struggling with a practical question. "Getting the code to write reviews was only the first part of the challenge," says Carlson, Guarini '21, a doctoral research fellow at the Tuck School of Business, "The remaining challenge was figuring out how and where it could be used." The original study took on two challenges: to design code that could write original, human-quality product reviews using a small set of product features and to see if the algorithm could be adapted to write "synthesis reviews" for products from a large number of existing reviews.