Your business needs online reviews. Over 99.9% of customers read reviews when shopping online. For over half of consumers, more reviews = a better company reputation. And if your overall rating drops below 3.3 stars, customers are likely to choose somewhere else to shop.
However, collecting these reviews is sometimes easier said than done. To get five-star reviews across the web, you need to identify happy customers, find the right time and place to ask them to write a review, and spend time managing and responding to these reviews on a variety of platforms.
This is why some businesses might be tempted to use ChatGPT, a newly popular artificial intelligence chatbot, to write online reviews. ChatGPT is capable of writing reviews of a product or business. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Read our breakdown of how ChatGPT works and whether or not you should use it to write reviews online.
What is ChatGPT?
These days, ChatGPT is the latest internet buzzword that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot created by OpenAI and originally launched in November 2022.
This chatbot interacts with you in a conversational, humanlike way, and can follow instructions to write anything from poetry to computer programs to essays. You can access the bot for free with an OpenAI account. A paid subscription version is now available, too.
Can ChatGPT write online reviews?
Yes. ChatGPT is able to write reviews of a product or business. In fact, YouTube is already swamped with videos teaching you how to write Amazon reviews or other product reviews using ChatGPT.
These tutorials walk you through how to create a review with ChatGPT, showing how this tool can produce a review that talks about the pros and cons of a product and how it can be used. While it may be okay for buyers or consumers to ask ChatGPT to help them write an article about a product, it’s a different story for businesses. As a business owner or representative, you should not use ChatGPT to write reviews about your own product.
ChatGPT can be a helpful resource to create content for your company website, such as blog posts that share more information about your product, its features, and how it can solve your customers’ problems. But it is not ethical to generate fake online reviews with ChatGPT.
Pros and cons of writing reviews with ChatGPT
Like any digital tool, ChatGPT has both pros and cons. It’s easy, fast, and convenient to ask the bot a question and get an immediate, detailed response.
One journalist, who asked ChatGPT to write a review of the iPhone 14 Pro, said the review flowed well and did a good job of mentioning the product’s user experience. However, the review included inaccurate information, was too favorable, and did not have any personality.
Interestingly, ChatGPT seems to be programmed to only write positive reviews. A college professor who has taught a class on ChatGPT asked the bot to write a negative review of a business and received a response stating, “It would be unethical for me to produce a negative review of a business.”
However, the bot’s responses tend to sound formal rather than conversational. And you’re taking a risk on the chatbot pulling inaccurate information into its review. OpenAI itself warns users that ChatGPT might generate information that’s harmful, biased, or incorrect.
What’s more, ChatGPT does not and cannot provide any original insight into products or businesses like a human consumer would. Keep in mind, too, that ChatGPT is still in development. While impressive, the bot is continually being refined.
Why you shouldn’t write fake reviews
The Federal Trade Commission sets standards for endorsements and testimonials used in advertising (in other words, online reviews). These guidelines state that you should not ask for reviews from people who haven’t actually used or experienced your product or service. This means writing fake reviews is actually illegal, as Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Commission Act states that deceptive practices affecting commerce are prohibited. The FTC has been known to crack down on businesses that manipulate reviews, sometimes requiring these companies to pay millions of dollars as a consequence.
Your customers need to trust you, and reviews are a way of building trust. But those reviews need to be from genuine customers who have actually interacted with your brand — not from a bot that you instructed yourself.
OpenAI recently released an AI Text Classifier tool that can help detect whether a piece of writing was produced by ChatGPT or other AI sources. This resource isn’t 100% accurate but is still something to keep in mind — if you use a bot like ChatGPT to write an online review, people may be able to use a tool like this one to detect whether a human actually wrote your content.
At the end of the day, even if it were legal, using ChatGPT to write online reviews just isn’t worth the risk.
Get online reviews the right way
Online reviews are important. They help keep your business not only surviving, but thriving. Of all the ways — ChatGPT isn’t the way to get them.
Ditch the bot and ask your real customers for reviews instead. You’ll stay legal and above board, and your customers will know they can trust your brand — which will make them return again and again.
