Nowadays, you see a lot of user reviews of products and services on sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and Amazon. Most of the people read these peer reviews and trust what they see without knowing that not all of them are legitimate. Some of the reviews are fake. In fact, up to 40 per cent of users decide to make a purchase based on only a couple of reviews and great reviews make people spend 30 per cent more on their purchases. To combat this, an artificial intelligence (AI) system has been developed by the scientists that can identify machine-generated fake reviews on online e-commerce websites.

It is sad to report that, as a people, we have become less trusting in the world around us and the institutions we engage with on a daily basis. According to Gallup, confidence in institutions such as banks, government, and the police (to name a few) have decreased over the past 10 years. When it comes to media, trust in television news and newspapers has decreased by 10 percent since 2006. Both are now trusted by less than 21 percent of the U.S. population, per the same study. From a consumer perspective, instead of relying on salespeople or brand advertising and other traditional sources of media, we now inherently seek answers online.