You can’t trust everything you read on the internet. We know this to be true, even if that’s a bit paradoxical, as the axiom is so often repeated ON the internet.

But we can’t research everything. Try as we might, we can’t read everything. And hey, you know where you are, you know where this is going. This is Review Party Dot Com, so we’re talking about all them reviews out there. The honest, the earnest, the copy-paste, and paid. The biased, the bot-borne. The trolls, the memes, the statements. You could parse through all that, goodness knows I’ve done it. But when you’re just trying to spend that dollar and spend it fast (because you’re competing against bots that are trying to buy all the PS5s), you just want the straight facts. Right?

Well. A big name in the review game (and quite a smaller name) think they have what will help you out:

AI-generated review summaries.

How’s that now?

Here’s how it works. You, me, Joe Blow, the guy Joe Blow is paying to write reviews, the bots set up by Joe Blows competitors- all of US write our reviews like we would on any purchase we make, any Amazon find or Newegg… hatching? THEN, an AI comes in and sweeps through our reviews, looking for, as Amazon puts it, “the common theme across reviews.”

Then you end up with something like this (currently only for mobile shoppers on Amazon):

So there it is! In all its glory!

Okay, that’s not the full glory, but what we see here is a smattering of terms that the AI scrubbed from reviews, as well as a color/symbol indication on how people weighed in. This basketball here? Good value. We’re mixed on how it bounces. But lemme tell ya, it’s cleanliness is horrible- this is a dirty basketball!

Actually clicking on the terms WILL bring up an additional summary, as well as a breakdown of positive/negative reviews, and the reviews that were sampled:

Here we see some of the actual AI-generated summary, in this case a summation of how adhesive some - checks notes - some pasties are.

Over on Newegg, it’s the same concept, but carried out maybe a bit less elegantly.

Starts weak, gets stronger with Newegg. Like, why does it say the Nintendo Switch is known for arriving in perfect condition, then note that the box gets beat up? There are other instances of seemingly contradictory points seen in Newegg’s reviews, and ChatGPT shows that it can struggle discerning whether a review is more talking about the quality of shipping vs the quality of a product. That said, the Xbox review summary looks pretty clean.

But do we trust these summaries to accurately summarize? Why not just highlight the key words and leave it at that?

After all, that’s what Google has long done now:

If my concern is messy fries, I can click to have those reviews served up for me. If I want the deets on their Nashville Hot Chicken, BAM, I click, I read, I go and eat.

Maybe we’ll get to a point where the AIs out there can parse all the weird little details we humans leave in our reviews, but for now, I’d rather sift through the trough, sniffing out the reviews I can trust and discarding the ones written by weirdos or worse, by bots.