Would you trust an AI-written product review?

Before purchasing products, do you read product reviews first? What if the product reviews you have been reading, the ones you’ve been trusting and actually based your purchases on, weren’t written by people who used the products but by AI? And according to a 2025 study, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. ¹

This is a kind of future that’s already here.

There are tools designed to generate affiliate marketing content, with complete reviews, comparison guides, and personal takes about products the AI has never touched, much less used. If you want to generate reviews with such tools, all you need to do is provide the product URL, and you’ll get a product review within minutes. What’s even more surprising is how convincingly human AI-written reviews sound.

While fake human reviews are also common, I feel equally uncomfortable about AI-written ones. Maybe because AI-generated reviews, like fake human reviews, talk about experiences that don’t exist.

And if we can’t tell the difference between product reviews written by people with real product experience and by an AI that has never used it, then what are we really trusting?

Would it be so hard to trust anything in the future? I wonder.

1. Cheng, X., Zeng, A., Yang, B., Liu, Y., & Zhang, X. (2025). Online reviews generated by generative artificial intelligence versus human: A study of perceived differences and user adoption behavior. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 71, 101497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2025.101497 ↩︎