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.
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.
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…
Some companies, shit like this coming up in the news is QA
Many companies I’ve worked at are like this. No need to pay for QA, let the end users test it.
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?
I’ll bite. I disagree with this.
I buy things, I get them in a reasonable time at a reasonable price. If something is wrong, I can return. Their customer service is one of the best. I feel more comfortable buying things there with Prime since I know they’ll take care of me.
I wish Prime was cheaper … I wish everything was. Every company jacks up prices.
It’s not even close to AliExpress. The quality of Amazon is far superior. I buy stuff from AliExpress and I have to wait 2 weeks, have worse customer support, etc. I bought something once and didn’t get any info until it arrived at my door 4 weeks later. I asked what’s up at week 3 and was told to wait till 4 before they can look into it.
Amazon is a marketplace, anyone can create a store and put up items. It’s not really Amazon’s fault that people have BS listings. It’s not reasonable to human-vet every listing. Maybe they could have a better reporting system; idk.
Could they do better on ratings and other things? Sure. Heck they added the ai summary for reviews. I like that. Are they still the best general marketplace for consumers: in my opinion: yes.
I ordered a random endoscopic camera for a car issue. Less than 20 bucks. It’ll be here in a couple days. It’s from a random brand. If it works: great. If not: money back. I like the choice of random brands and maybe some I’ve heard of. Choice is good.
My big issue with amazon these days is that it’s flooded with trash. Like sure if you want some disposable garbage that you dont think twice about or if a very specific item you know is good is for sale on their site you can use them and their return policy is good.
But otherwise the flood of no-name vendors has become like browsing a more expensive wish.com. So many randomly generated non reputable companies selling the same rebranded knockoffs of knockoffs at various price points. It used to be that at least you could go up in price bracket and get to the actual products but now even that is hard. You can check out products worth over a hundred dollars and it still have mixed reviews and no actual brand recognition . It’s gotten to the point that if its something that matters or is more that $50 I search on big box sites and either order directly for them or find the item and get it off amazon.
Yeah once I stopped buying from Amazon I realised how many of my supposed needs were just wants. Like, it’s ok if I can’t get literal brass tacks for a project this week. It’s not urgent. Nothing ever was. I didn’t need any of this shit in the 90s and I don’t need it now. I just got used to having it, and had to adjust to intentionally going without it (for ethical reasons).
Amazon is a marketplace, anyone can create a store and put up items. It’s not really Amazon’s fault that people have BS listings. It’s not reasonable to human-vet every listing. Maybe they could have a better reporting system; idk.
I’ll push back on this part. They can vet just fine by raising the barrier to entry a bit. They’d have fewer products. There’d be three USB cable vendors instead of 500. That would be OK.
Leaning into Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) can be OK in some circumstances. Leave all the gates wide open and let anyone in. Steam is a good example; I find most of my games by word of mouth, and if some shithole asset flipper wants to toss their game up there, I will probably never see it until Steph Sterling points it out.
I don’t think that can work for Amazon. It’s too much and fraud is rampant.
I disagree. I’d rather have 500 choices and let the consumer choose than a triopoly on my poor USB cables.
Edit: Maybe the ranking system needs more work. Personally I like seeing all and making choices. Though some may just want above board picks.
Reminds me of code. Too bad ya can’t just regex search combined with star ratings and some secret sauce to get rid of what the viewer thinks of as crap.
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.
Yep.
If I can wait = AliExpress.
If I can’t wait=Amazon next day, then return when the AliExpress one arrives.
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.
if I’m buying anything on AliExpress it’s usually various electronic parts and some tools. it’s really good for that kind of thing, way more of that than on UK Amazon and half the price. doesn’t help that I live in Ireland so occasionally you find something on UK Amazon that doesn’t ship to Ireland. the downside of AliExpress is that it takes a month for whatever you buy to arrive and the website is a mess
I had thought that electronics were specifically the worst options for counterfeit items. Things labels cables not being certified, or hard external hard drives filled with flash cards. That sort of thing.
I’m in the US, so maybe our Amazon markets are notably different in choices and prices.
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.
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.
iirc drop shipping is where they also ship it from China too. so the person dropshipping doesn’t have to keep an inventory of things
They’ve got an unparalleled* delivery network and kind of killer vertical integration (because they keep undercutting companies that work with them).
I mean I’ve been boycotting Amazon / aws for almost a decade, but they’re still quite powerful.
E: maybe it is paralleled idk don’t @ me, I just know it’s shockingly fast in NA
They’re rising in popularity in the Netherlands despite having the same delivery as any other website, things are usually just cheaper or more available on Amazon.
Cheaper for now. Amazon started that way in the US as well. That’s how you get everyone to switch to your platform. Then you leave it for a bit to cultivate a dependence on said platform, until finally you increase prices and rake it in. They could do this anywhere. They have the resources to undercut just about anyone for as long as it takes to starve out the competition.
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.
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.
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.
Two facts:
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AI detection of AI has both a false positive rate and a false negative rate approximately equal to random chance.
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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.
The real issue here isn’t the AI-generated listings. The “reviews” being so obviously fake is what I hope gains more traction.
