This feels like something of a non story to me. Using AI for product descriptions seems like an obvious and reasonable use case; and data entry errors are not uncommon nor terribly harmful in the context.
I think it's a sign of what's to come. A world where many things are done so shoddily and with such little regard that it becomes nearly impossible to navigate. You sift through a pile of crap trying to get basic shopping done, descriptions that are wrong and nonsensical, fictional product photos that are useless to judge scale or fitness for purpose, etc. When you finally find what you need, you end up receiving the wrong item because no one in the supply chain gave a shit. You try to get this resolved, and are bounced around a series of half-broken customer service bots. It's difficult and expensive to find alternatives who do give a shit, because the automated companies have driven prices (and quality) into the ground, and it ends up being cheaper and easier to let it go and try your luck again.
I don't know if that will come to pass or not, I sure hope not, but I think it's a real possibility and that things like this are the early warnings.
That way of looking at it feels like it focuses on the one error while ignoring that, in all likelihood, the same action that caused the error, probably improved 1000 other listings.
I guess I'm a glass half full kinda person, this shows me that someone is working on improving things. And I bet they're quite flush from all the attention cause by their oversight in a big spreadsheet. I bet they won't miss the next one. :)
I suspect someone was tasked with using the latest tools to improve a bunch of listings. 50 years ago they were given a typewriter for the same task, today they were given an LLM. It just feels like someone doing their job to me. Different year different tool. We no longer hand-transcribing books anymore, we don't lament that, and we won't lament LLMs one day either.
I think the purpose of automating product descriptions is far more likely to be to pay fewer people than to improve the quality of the listings.
I think if the purpose was to improve the quality rather than to crank them out - they probably wouldn't have let such severe and obvious errors get through, certainly not in such a large quantity. If I was tasked with doing this, at a minimum I would kick any listing that contained the word "OpenAI" into a QA queue rather than publishing it. Since they obviously didn't have even the minimal filters to catch errors, I have to infer they never spot checked their output for sanity. Because they didn't really give a shit.
It feels like someone doing their job to me too, sure. That job being to spam. When I see a watch, I infer the existence of a watchmaker. When I see a pile of spam, I infer the existence of a spammer.
