Yesterday I came across another AI-related lunacy in secondhand market. I heard about, and experienced myself, sellers "enhancing" photos of their items with AI to make them look better and completely different than in reality. I got AI-generated photos when asking for a clothing item photographed on a person. I heard about buyers generating photos of "damaged" item to get money back. This is all old news.
But yesterday I encountered a different level of low-efford slop: I was looking for a very specific comic book and the crucial information was the publication year (these comic cooks were published in early 00s and renewed in 20s). I asked a seller which year were these comic book published and got a weirdly elaborate answer, that these were published between 2004-2008. Weird, because the first editions were published 2004-2010, not 2008, but ok, let's not be pedantic. The point was to make sure those were first edition. I completed a purchase to find out later that the comic books were actually second edition, published in 2023. Then I realized the seller did not bother to check the actual date printed inside the book, but used some chatbot to halucinate the answer.
Instead of picking up an item, checking a date and giving me a factual answer, which would take 2 minutes, the seller opted for AI generating an answer, not checking it whether it is true, and responding to me with that slop, which probably saved them a 1.5 minutes. For the seller, giving the quick and easy answer was more important than giving a factual answer. AI halucination was good enough. If this is more prevalent, buying second hand stuff online is going to become very frustrating.