Unmask It! AI-Generated Product Review Detection in Dravidian Languages

Abstract: The rise of Generative AI has led to a surge in AI-generated reviews, often posing a serious threat to the credibility of online platforms. Reviews serve as the primary source of information about products and services. Authentic reviews play a vital role in consumer decision-making. The presence of fabricated content misleads consumers, undermines trust and facilitates potential fraud in digital marketplaces. This study focuses on detecting AI-generated product reviews in Tamil and Malayalam, two low-resource languages where research in this domain is relatively under-explored. We worked on a range of approaches - from traditional machine learning methods to advanced transformer-based models such as Indic-BERT, IndicSBERT, MuRIL, XLM-RoBERTa and MalayalamBERT. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of leveraging the state-of-the-art transformers in accurately identifying AI-generated content, demonstrating the potential in enhancing the detection of fake reviews in low-resource language settings.