Amazon has been listing products with the title, ‘I’m sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy’::Products have appeared on the platform with odd titles that are seemingly related to OpenAI’s usage policy.

  • veee@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    The real issue here isn’t the AI-generated listings. The “reviews” being so obviously fake is what I hope gains more traction.

  • deafboy@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The only thing amazon had was a brand. They’ve sold it for short term profit and now it’s just a shittier aliexpress. The question is, why not go for the real thing?

    • Spiralvortexisalie@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Shipping speed for me, Aliexpress is 11 days or less, Amazon Prime 2 days or less. I think its funny they’ve copied Fedex with their main routes being in-house and their last-mile being “independent” contractors (Fedex Ground / Amazon Flex), and now Fedex will copy them with their upcoming FDX platform, which I believe is supposed to be an upgrade to shoprunner that will continue to sell from other Vendors but more like how amazon and walmart do it, where its a footnote on the item details.

      • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yep.

        If I can wait = AliExpress.

        If I can’t wait=Amazon next day, then return when the AliExpress one arrives.

          • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            It feels more iffy than AliExpress. I got a series of items from Remy that were technically the description but at the lowest quality possible to qualify. AliExpress refund system has been solid for me.

          • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Butting in: Temu has been aggressively pursuing a market share, once it has reached a large audience the deals will be less good. It also enables various varieties of affiliate marketing which get a little scammy (you’ve probably had a Facebook friend or random TikTok aggressively push Temu) and the app harvests a shit ton of data from you.

            AliExpress has been fairly consistent for years. AliBaba is what a lot of merchants in the US use to purchase and resell goods, AliExpress just feels like taking out a middleman.

            Ultimately, it’s best to comparison shop. Amazon, Temu, Ali will all often have the same item up, just find the one that’s cheapest.

      • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        Depends who you buy from. I’ve had shipping take 2-3 weeks on some items since the sellers are just the same Chinese companies as Ali.

    • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Honest question here…

      I was always under the impression that AliExpress is worse than Amazon. Now, Amazon is not good, I know that, but I guess the narratives I was fed is that AliExpress is like Wish, and just terrible, counterfeit/knockoff products (Amazon on that fast track), excessive data capture, and I thought CCP (probably confusing with Temu).

      Anyway, can you quick explain how AliExpress is a less shitty Amazon? I’ll start doing some shopping there if that’s the case.

      • lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        10 months ago

        Amazon has essentially become a drop shipping front for AliExpress. You’re getting the exact same terrible, knockoff products, just marked up and stored in an Amazon warehouse so you get it in two days instead of two weeks. They’re both shitty, but at least with AliExpress you aren’t paying extra for the middleman to make a profit.

        • BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I mean it completely depends on what you’re buying. Don’t blame Amazon that your $15 wireless earbuds with no brand name feels cheap and gets hot.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            I find myself half agreeing with this and half disagreeing.

            Should we not hold Amazon accountable for not vetting what’s on their store?

            If I went in to a physical shop and bought a knife, then when I got home the handle fell off, is it not reasonable to be angry at the brand and the shop I bought it from?

            Yeah, it’s not their product, but they gave the product their approval in the form of carrying the item for sale.

            If Amazon marketed themselves as an open marketplace, like eBay, I’d say fair enough. But that’s not what they do, Amazon markets themselves as an online store with their own warehouses. They’re more akin to an online supermarket.

          • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            I don’t blame Amazon for the products being shit. I blame Amazon for not doing anything about the fact the shit product has 3000 5 star reviews that are word for word on hundreds of different products.

    • doctorcrimson@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      If I have to go to different sites for my Glyceryl Monostearate, Dehydroacetic Acid, Sodium Lactate, Benzyl Alcohol, a bag of Japanese Candy, a Keyboard cable repair kit, thousands of live ladybugs, some new tiny 1/32 and 1/64 paintbrushes, and 500 pairs of dust free latex gloves then I might as well just not shop online at all.

      This comment was joking btw, half that shit isn’t even available on Amazon rn.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        It’s true though I’ve had orders where I bought a multimeter, soap, Szechuan pepper, and a bamboo shelf for the bath. That’s at least three stores and more likely four.

        It’s the only advantage they have left, here in Germany Amazon has become worse and worse and worse with shipping. Unless the online store is set up in the boondonks or you live there next-day delivery is the norm, and pretty much all other shops dispatch packages on the same day as long as you order early enough, Amazon often takes days to dispatch, and if I want to use my close-by Hermes pickup they take weeks because apparently they don’t like how much Hermes is charging them. And no I won’t be paying for fucking prime to get a service level you get everywhere else as standard.

        AliExpress, meanwhile, I mean it’s hit and miss but if you’re ordering something from out of a EU warehouse it arrives reasonably quickly, usually the next day after. If you’re ordering directly from China all bets are off right now: The northern rail links via Russia are down, so is pretty much the red sea, what’s left is the Horn of Africa or the TRACECA rail link. Also doing import yourself can be a bureaucratic nightmare possibly involving first figuring out where your local customs office is (it usually won’t be local at all) if they retained the package.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Feels like it’ll be less than a year before we get AI replies in our messaging apps, then it’s nothing but AI sending messages back and forth.

      • wikibot@lemmy.worldB
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        10 months ago

        Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

        The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating "The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population". The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017.The theory has gained traction because much of the observed phenomena is grounded in quantifiable phenomena like increased bot traffic. However, the idea that it is a coordinated psyop has been described by Kaitlin Tiffany, staff writer at The Atlantic, as a "paranoid fantasy," even if there are legitimate criticisms involving bot traffic and the integrity of the internet.

        to opt out, pm me ‘optout’. article | about

    • Muffi@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      Before leaving Reddit, I frequently saw what was clearly LLM bots having “conversations” in the comments. Shit’s just starting to get weird.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      It already exists. Some spambots are using LLM generated messages to reply to users (possibly for engagement/apparent legitimacy).

      Won’t be too long before you have two separate spam networks “talking” to each other.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The worst part about this is not that punters have tried it, because we all know an expect the level of scumminess we’ll get from random Amazon vendors. It’s that nobody upstairs noticed (or cared…) and brought the hammer down on them until actual people started complaining.

    • PopcornTin@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Damn, and I’m fresh out of I’m sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy.

    • wesley@yall.theatl.social
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      10 months ago

      Yeah same here. I tried searching a few days ago when another article first came out about this and I couldn’t find anything. Even using the links in the article.

      Maybe the products were all removed in response to the article?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The site has been playing host to items with names such as, “I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy.”

    One dresser previously listed on Amazon was called, "I’m sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy.

    The trend suggests companies might be using OpenAI’s popular chatbot to create product descriptions, including item names, without reviewing the final results.

    Another listing, which appears to be a piece of hose, is titled: “I apologize, but I cannot complete this task it requires using trademarked brand names which goes against OpenAI use policy.”

    Representatives for Amazon and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

    In a statement shared with Futurism, the company said: “We work hard to provide a trustworthy shopping experience for customers, including requiring third-party sellers to provide accurate, informative product listings.”


    The original article contains 265 words, the summary contains 152 words. Saved 43%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This would be easy to fix. Just run the result of the first openai api call into another one asking “Is this a valid product description?”. Or even cheaper, just filter out any results that contain openai.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Two facts:

      • AI detection of AI has both a false positive rate and a false negative rate approximately equal to random chance.

      • Filtering out any product that contains “OpenAI” as a string would preclude any books about the product; in addition to any stickers meant to identify AI-generated content, printed products decrying or identifying it, products meant to work with or connect to it, and so forth.

      Generally that sort of heavy-handed automatic moderation is more trouble than it’s worth.

  • KinNectar@kbin.run
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    10 months ago

    Their products will fail and they will learn. This is likely people who do not know English very well seeking to use AI to automatically name their products for them. Not a terrible application for AI, but certainly shouldn’t be fully automated with no editorial oversight.

    • ilmagico@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Yes, there are a lot of legitimate users for this AI technology, and writing a meaningful product listing title from (say) a longer product description, maybe in a different language, seems fine to me. Even using trademarked names could be ok, if the product sold has them (e.g. “mini pc with Intel ™ processor”).

      The fact that they are generated and used without anybody even looking at them is highly suspicions, of course…