They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account...
Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.
It could be something like that (hint: they already deployed an offline neural network in Firefox with which you can translate web pages), and the idea would be to detect AI-generated content.
Well it will be, because it's detecting AI-generated content indirectly. What it's directly detecting are bot posters, which are much easier to spot.
"AI detectors" have the uphill job of having to figure out whether something is generated by looking only at what was generated. Fakespot and tools like it get to use the metadata, which has many telltales that bots aren't even trying to hide.
IDK chief. It seems like one of those things that are hard to do in theory as you said, but relatively easy in practice.
I mean just about any human who has played a bit with ChatGPT nowadays is able to identify ChatGPT generated paragraphs within a few words. I don’t suppose it would be much harder for a machine.
Elsewhere in this thread someone explained that its just integrating FakeSpot into the browser, which uses basic email spam detection techniques to detect fake reviews by analyzing how the reviewer posts. Is there a set schedule they post reviews by, what else have they reviewed, how new is the account, etc. A 2 day old account with 20 reviews would be an obvious source of fake reviews for example