"Sometime around Christmas, Sarah Burzio noticed that the holiday sales bump for her stationery business included some mysterious new customers: a flurry of orders from anonymous email addresses associated with Amazon.com Inc. Burzio, who doesn't sell her products on the retail giant's site, soon discovered that Amazon had duplicated her product listings and made purchases on behalf of Amazon customers under email addresses that read like gibberish followed by buyforme.amazon. I didn't worry about, it to be honest, she said. We were getting customers."
"Amazon's listings, automatically generated by an experimental artificial intelligence tool, didn't always correspond to the correct product in Burzio's inventory. In one case, a shopper who thought they were receiving a softball-sized stress ball, which Burzio's Hitchcock Paper Co. doesn't sell, received the smaller version of the product that her northern Virginia store does carry. People ordering these Christmas gifts and holiday gifts were getting the wrong items and demanding refunds,"
"Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, small shop owners and artisans who had found their products listed on Amazon took to social media to compare notes and warn their peers. Angie Chua of Bobo Design Studio in California posted videos on Instagram documenting her experience. In interviews, six small shop owners said they found themselves unwittingly selling their products on Amazon's digital marketplace. Some, especially those who deliberately avoided Amazon, said they should have been asked for their consent."
An experimental Amazon AI tool duplicated external product listings and generated purchases using anonymous Amazon email addresses. Small shop owners received orders that they had not listed on Amazon and sometimes shipped incorrect items because the AI-generated listings mismatched inventory. Customers received wrong products, demanded refunds, and small sellers had to explain the situation while fulfilling orders exactly as received. Many sellers discovered the issue via social media and documented experiences. Some sellers that intentionally avoided Amazon objected that their consent was not sought. Others noted the irony of Amazon's AI scraping amid legal action against similar AI firms.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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