Reddit launches Reddit Reviews, a built-in hub using AI to turn subreddit comments into product pages with pros, cons, and sentiment, starting with 10K items (Mia Sato/The Verge)

Reddit has introduced an AI-powered feature called Reviews, which will debut with over 10,000 products across various categories such as electronics, health and beauty, home and garden, and fashion and apparel. The new feature aims to provide an "easy-to-digest format" with a "what people are saying" recap, visual breakdowns indicating the overall sentiment, and common sentiments among users.

Users can then delve deeper by browsing comments, applying topic filters, reading original user discussions, asking follow-up questions, or exploring other commonly compared products.

The AI-generated reviews utilize a combination of generative AI and in-house technology to identify themes and summarize users' opinions. Companies cannot pay to influence the product features, ensuring authenticity within the community. Reddit representatives assured that users are at the heart of this initiative, as the Reviews are shaped by the community and not influenced by commercialization.

To ensure the integrity of the Reviews, the platform will take measures against bots and fake reviews. Reddit will detect and label apps, which are registered API clients developed to interact with Reddit, including posting, commenting, upvoting, and scraping. The system will label known bots, and reviews will include a "review conversation" that describes a person's experience with a product.

Reddit has also defined rules to help its language models identify these review conversations based on the surrounding conversation for context.

The new feature will be rolled out over the next few weeks in the US on iOS, Android, and browser versions of the site. Users can expect to start seeing Reddit Reviews for around 10,000 products across different categories, which could simplify the process of gathering true user sentiment and provide valuable insights for decision-making.