Chefs Tech: Will Artificial Intelligence Make Restaurant Reviews Obsolete?

Editor's Note: In September we announced that Skift was expanding into food and drink with the addition of the Chefs Tech newsletter. We see this as a natural expansion of the Skift umbrella, bringing the big-picture view on the future of dining out, being fanatically focused on the guest experience, and at the intersection of marketing and tech. We publish C T twice weekly. As if online reviews didn't already have a legitimacy problem (looking at you, one-star-because-it's-closed-on-Monday Yelpers), a recent University of Chicago paper details how easy it is to use artificial intelligence (or, bots) to produce fraudulent restaurant reviews. The bots can read real reviews posted by real people and learn the language, posting real-sounding reviews that can even go undetected by a site's automated bot-detection software.