[keanebean86]

Are those sites generated by bots now? They always seem to just be the top x results if you search on Amazon directly.

[jeltz]

I would guess most are written by humans. I know a lot of affiliates (mostly gambling but also finance and shopping) and most of their stuff is produced manually. There is some more automation these days but the industry is surprisingly manual.

[mtoddsmith]

The reviews are usually somewhat accurate but only include items found on Amazon. So I'm guessing they hire people to write the reviews.

[FabHK]

I have the impression that they use ghostwriters that summarise a couple of Amazon reviews, gain some superficial familiarity with the subject (talking points), but have no real experience with it. I've seen many of such sites (mattresses, bike accessories, VPNs, certain apps, etc.) that seem superficially plausible, but here and there betray profound ignorance of the subject matter.

[sjg007]

I imagine that once these "businesses" get a hold of GTP2 or GPT3 they will crank them out.

[hedora]

I think they already have:

https://francescocolumbu.com/best-laptop-for-openbsd/

[detaro]

Some for sure are (i.e. some really just are stringed-together sentences comparing numbers), many probably are just really low quality manual work.

[rland]

They're written by humans. I know someone who did this, she was paid by the word and would write "best 5 [product]" lists several times a month.

Obviously, you only have time to basically summarize points made on the listing and in the reviews for the product for it to be worthwhile.

This was pre GPT-2, though.