Tripadvisor AI summaries give glowing reviews to dangerous hotels

30 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by jethronethro

11 Comments

solenoid0937

13 hours ago

Someone should get the bot to leak system instructions. I'd bet good money TripAdvisor has configured it to be positive.

The TripAdvisor spokesperson said people can just look at the reviews, "eliminating any need to blindly trust AI-generated content." How about these clowns just fix their harness instead?

raychis

13 hours ago

This is exactly why AI summaries shouldn’t be trusted blindly, especially when safety concerns can be buried under hundreds of positive reviews.

It is a big problem that the uncertainty in the text produced by LLMs isn't surfaced to users. It is also a big problem that companies think that shoehorning AI summaries everywhere is a good idea.

userbinator

12 hours ago

Is it actually a "summary" of the reviews, or did they just ask the AI to generate a flattering compliment? Because AI often seems very eager to do the latter, possibly due to an abundance of "toxic positivity".

aurareturn

12 hours ago

The answer is obviously deliberate prompting to make negative reviews sound less bad.

1. Booking websites want to convert more users

2. Hotels will get angry if a booking website's AI summary is negative

Fire-Dragon-DoL

12 hours ago

Won't they have the same problem Google is having, where since the content is AI generated and the AI is controlled by TripAdvisor, they are liable for what it says?

rwmj

12 minutes ago

As long as they get fat bonuses this quarter, that's next quarter's problem.

rwmj

12 hours ago

mhitza

11 hours ago

Good fallback in case the page gets changed, currently instead of listing a journalist the article had a bunch of "Which?" placeholders :)

Fun editorial slip up over there.

HarHarVeryFunny

10 hours ago

This seems like a great way to destroy your business.

The only reason people go to Trip Advisor is because these are real reviews from real people.

Adding an AI summary that is lying (whether deliberately or by incompetence) about what those reviews say, means they now have a site that can no longer be trusted.