If you ask an AI for the best pizza place in town how would you know if the answer is paid for or not?

There's no defense against a future in which an AI response has undisclosed purchased bias. Regulation is impotent.

To be fair that's been the case since there were food reviews.

But not at this scale.

Imagine if every response in this thread was AI generated. Or a Reddit/TripAdvisor/set of Google Maps reviews. Just enough criticism to make you think there's fairness.

This is possible today, but gen AI has made/is making this pedestrian to do.

You are right, not at this scale, but it was even worse in the past. The only critic you even could read was whatever food writer landed the job at the paper. And thats what I was getting at, that the old source of truth wasn't really a source of truth at all, but one that is just as liable to be perverted for gain like we fear of the new world and the new patterns for product reviews. One must look into the mirror sometimes and realize a lot of our greatest fears have already manifested into this world, but given that, the damage might not be quite what we fear to expect to come given how we have seemed to survive unscathed so far.