You’ve probably heard about eBay’s tool that lets sellers enter a small amount of information (or even just an image), and have AI fill out the listing, including the descriptive fields. On Wednesday, Amazon announced an AI tool of its own that lets sellers use generative AI to simplify the listing creation process.
Amazon announced the new AI tool at the Amazon Accelerate seller conference taking place this week in Seattle. It explained in its announcement on the small-business blog on AboutAmazon.com:
“To get started, sellers only need to provide a brief description of the product in a few words or sentences, and Amazon will generate high-quality content for their review. Sellers can refine these, if they want to, or they can directly submit the automatically generated content to the Amazon catalog.”
Amazon said the new AI listing capabilities would make it faster and easier for sellers to list new products as well as enrich existing listings, helping customers more confidently make purchase decisions.
In writing about the new tool on Wednesday, TechCrunch referred to a known issue with generative AI: “its ability to “hallucinate” — or create false information not based on real data.”
TechCrunch wrote, “The tools could also potentially contain other mistakes that aren’t caught if a human doesn’t review the output. And if the tools end up creating incorrect product listings and descriptions, Amazon could be held liable — particularly if it doesn’t disclose the listing was created using AI.”
We asked Amazon who would be responsible for any errors in AI-generated content and how that would be made clear to sellers who use AI tools on Amazon, and will update the post when we get a response; but it may be that sellers will continue to be responsible for the accuracy of their listings, no matter if they’re created by the sellers themselves or an assistant, human or otherwise.
Update 9/14/2023: Sellers will be required to review content before it is submitted to the Amazon catalog and can refine the content as needed. The screenshots in Amazon’s announcement show that the system prompts sellers to review the AI-generated content – sellers must ensure it complies with intellectual property and listing policies, which are published on Amazon Seller Central.
The eBay monthly chat today was split between eBay Open and eBay AI. Response was minimal. Apparently, the “feature” is available only on mobile devices with a small screen and a tiny keyboard. It will not be useful until it reaches desktops, workstations, and the API.
I already have software to create listings from Item Specifics. There is very little for AI to do except to write a short marketing message.
Creating good titles is a real problem. An AI application for creating effective titles could be immediately useful if based on actual sales results. I have about 10,000 eBay and HipStamp sales in a database. I would think an AI application might find some useful correlations between sales and titles assuming condition is accounted for.
Why would anyone trust an eBay AI feature with undisclosed inputs, unproven algorithms, and a mystery objective function?
So if the human (seller) still has to review what the d@mn AI writes, then why not just write things yourself at that point? Don’t be lazy now, you humans.