[photochemsyn]

The most immediate practical result might be that online product reviews written by AI will be indistinguishable from those written by humans, essentially making online reviews useless to consumers as a source of reliably independent information about various products and services.

On the other hand, perhaps AI could help with due diligence types of inquiries from an independent standpoint? A real-time online AI research assistant with web scraping capabilities would be interesting.

[theK]

That's not completely correct. The review world is roughly splittable in two broad categories, the "expert person" variant (think fro-knows-photo) and marketplace reviews (the reviews you can find on amazon, etc).

Marketplace reviews are well guardable in terms of that you need to have an account there that purchased the same sku.*

Expert person reviews are based on trust. There is a destructive correlations between spaming Ai reviews and creating a valuable brand as an expert person. So you cannot really do a hard play on ai here, maybe a soft one but that would arguably be just "going with the times".

* Some might ask "why does amazon still have issues with review spam?" Answer is that amazon actually has a pretty firm grip on it, nonetheless the marketplace's incentives seem to be such that some slippage is acceptable/helpful for them.