Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 79. Sunrise is 7:26, and sunset is 5:50, for 10 hours, 24 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent, with 7.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1969, the first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
California-man Eric Hovde’s out-of-state bank, Sunwest, has been the recipient of bogus favorable reviews. Dan Bice reports Major job site flags Eric Hovde’s Sunwest Bank over fake reviews to boost rating:
Glassdoor, the online platform where workers go to dish on their employers, has placed an alert on its Sunwest page stating that it has detected an attempt to “inflate reviews” for the $3.3 billion financial institution.
“We have evidence that someone has taken steps to artificially inflate the rating for this employer in violation of our Community Guidelines,” states the Glassdoor alert on Sunwest’s page. “We have addressed the issue. Please exercise your best judgment when evaluating this employer.”
The company says it posts such alerts in the “rare instances” that it identifies “particularly aggressive attempts by employers or others to influence or manipulate the integrity of reviews.”
Glassdoor did not say who it believes is responsible for Sunwest’s reviews.
After removing dozens of questionable reviews, the overall rating for Sunwest has dropped from a 4.9 overall score out of 5.0 to a 3.1. Hovde’s approval rating as Sunwest CEO has also been lowered from 98% to 79%. And the percentage of people who say they would recommend the company to a friend has plummeted from 98% to 43%.
But wait, there’s more! The Journal Sentinel investigated further:
We decided to check out the Sunwest reviews at the popular job search site Indeed to see if anyone might be posting bogus information there.
Here is what we found:
Journal Sentinel data journalist Eva Wen ran each of the company’s 105 reviews through GPTZero, a platform that identifies text generated using artificial intelligence.
Everything appeared to be on the up and up between 2012 and April 2024. But that all changed on May 22, three months after Hovde entered the U.S. Senate race.
Beginning on that date, GPTZero identified 15 of the 30 reviews as AI-generated with 100% certainty. There was more than 75% certainty that two others were also created via AI — meaning more than half of the recent reviews were AI creations. The AI-generated reviews are all overwhelmingly positive or give high ratings.
Honest to goodness. Out-of-state life, out-of-state bank, can’t bother to the study farm bill that matters to our state: Hovde’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a serious candidate.
Previously at FREE WHITEWATER: Hovde Rationalizes His Ignorance and Sloth, California Carpetbagger with a Utah Bank Doesn’t Bother to Read Farm Bill on Which Wisconsin Agriculture Relies, Hovde & Baldwin, Hovde Spreads Lies About Hurricane Response (Of Course He Does), These Aren’t Subtle Men, Eric Hovde’s Banking Deal with a Cartel-Linked Mexican Bank, Hovde’s Evident, Ignorant Racism, Eric Hovde Treats Wisconsin as a Side Hustle, It’s Not Going So Well for Hovde, Eric Hovde Should Fire His Political Consultants and Hire a Therapist, Tim Michels 2.0 Eric Hovde Announces U.S. Senate Run, and Another Vanity Candidate.