Very lazy AI content has already contaminated our supply of books and music. Now two great forces of enshittification - dubious use of generative AI and Amazon - have collided to produce bizarre listings for physical products.
How do we know this for sure? Well, aside from using common sense, The Verge searched Amazon for the phrase “OpenAI policy” and found a whole bunch of products for sale whose name was little more than a ChatGPT-style apology. Presumably no human - or at least no human who reads English - was all that involved in creating the listing. Some of the product photos don’t look exactly real either.
This was one of my favourites:
The “About this item” isn’t very human either. I’m so excited at being able to buy something to complete [task 1], [task 2] and [task 3] when I didn’t know that even $2000 chairs were used for more than one common task.
Amazon seems to have taken down most of the offending articles now, but it was fun of a kind while it lasted.