Mozilla Launches Fakespot Chat: AI-Powered Chatbot for Product Research

Mozilla Launches Fakespot Chat: An AI-Powered Chatbot to Combat Fake Reviews

Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has recently launched Fakespot Chat, an AI-powered chatbot designed to assist consumers in making informed purchasing decisions by answering questions about products and suggesting useful queries during the research process. The technology employs AI and machine learning to sort through product reviews, distinguishing between genuine and fake ones, in order to provide accurate information.

Fakespot Chat is available through the Fakespot Analyzer or Mozilla’s browser extension, and users do not need to create an account or provide personal information to use it. This chatbot is part of Mozilla’s broader commitment to building an independent open source AI ecosystem, which includes a $30 million investment in Mozilla.ai and the hosting of a Responsible AI Challenge.

The launch of Fakespot Chat comes as concerns about fake product reviews continue to grow. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has proposed a rule to ban fake reviews, warning that AI is making the problem even worse. Some Amazon product reviews have been transparently created using AI technology, such as GPT, as reported by CBNC in April. TripAdvisor has already removed over 20,000 reviews it believes contain AI-generated text from across more than 15,000 properties in its system, as reported by The Guardian in July.

Fakespot has been using AI to combat the issue, including the launch of a feature called Pros and Cons last year that summarizes a product’s positives and negatives using generative AI technology. The feature was trained on billions of data points, with the model itself using five different models under its hood.

While Fakespot Chat is not infallible, Mozilla encourages users to provide feedback to help improve its accuracy. The launch of Fakespot Chat is part of Mozilla’s broader efforts to make online shopping more trustworthy and reduce the time and effort required for product research.