There’s something strange happening on marketplaces and other platforms and that’s the phrase Sorry I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy. Yes, sellers listing in bulk are using AI to generate thousands of listing titles and descriptions and just shooting the whole lot live without catching all the errors.
It’s happening on Amazon, it’s happening on eBay, cut and paste OpenAI’s use policy into any search engine and you’re likely to find more than a few instances of AI error listing titles. Although Amazon seem to have caught on and filtered and killed listings with similar titles.
And it’s not just listing titles that have been sloppily created with OpenAI’s use policy errors, descriptions are also amusing with garbage bullet points. In a world of AI it’s too easy to create listings and in the case of the seller from the image above, they’ve got this one dodgy OpenAI’s use policy title out of their 360,000 listings on eBay…. but it does open the question as to how useful AI generated titles and descriptions really are and how many other listings are full of slightly less obvious garbage?
Many of the instances we’ve seen of OpenAI’s use policy title that were on Amazon are from faceless companies with what’s known as ‘Alphabet spaghetti’ names – a random meaningless unpronounceable jumble of letters that doesn’t instill any confidence in buyers. Indeed, if their accounts get shut down by Amazon no one really cares as they’ll be opening more and continually feeding listings to the marketplaces to keep the revenues pouring in.
There’s no suggestion that if you purchase from one of these sellers that you won’t get your item, but it’s pretty obvious that the images are computer generated, the titles and descriptions are created en masse by AI, and the absolute minimum amount of effort is put into the selling process. If this is the future of ecommerce, then those sites that have curated content will start to stand out while marketplaces will end up with ever more garbage.
Of course we expect the marketplaces to fight back and as mentioned Amazon have already scanned and removed the most heinous AI generated listings so you won’t find too many with OpenAI’s use policy titles. But it’s going to be a lot harder for platforms to identify vaguely sensible looking but still meaningless titles, so if you spot some dodgy titles or descriptions in the future at least you know that it’s probably AI to blame.
