Dissecting AI-Generated Fake Reviews: Detection and Analysis of GPT-Based Restaurant Reviews on Social Media

Recent advances in generative models such as GPT may be used to fabricate indistinguishable fake customer reviews at a much lower cost, posing challenges for social media platforms to detect this kind of content. This study addresses two research questions: (1) the effective detection of AI-generated restaurant reviews generated from high-quality elite authentic reviews, and (2) the comparison of out-of-sample predicted AI-generated reviews and authentic reviews across multiple dimensions of review, user, restaurant, and content characteristics. We fine-tuned a GPT text detector to predict fake reviews, significantly outperforming existing solutions. We applied the model to predict non-elite reviews that already passed the Yelp filtering system, revealing that AI-generated reviews typically score higher ratings, users posting such content have less established Yelp reputations and AI-generated reviews are more comprehensible and less linguistically complex than human-generated reviews. Notably, machine-generated reviews are more prevalent in low-traffic restaurants in terms of customer visits