Amazon allowed articles generated by ChatGPT to be posted online. The most ridiculous: the name of the products carries an error message from OpenAI.
A magnificent chest of drawers I’m sorry but I can’t respond to this request because it violates OpenAI’s terms of use “, who hasn’t dreamed of it? Thanks to Amazon, it was possible to order everything: chairs, sofas, chests of drawers, clothes. All with the same name, actually the same error message.
We owe this discovery to the journalists of The Verge who were able to take screenshots of the different products for sale on Amazon. The American giant is not the only one concerned. For several months, we have seen a proliferation of bots or texts and images generated by AI as proposed by OpenAI.
The latter attempts to control the use made of its tools, but the error messages returned do not prevent the bots from still publishing their false articles, products or tweets on social networks. We therefore end up with web pages bearing an error message in the title. If Amazon.com has since cleaned up, we can still find traces of it on Google.
All types of objects can be affected, with prices going in all directions. It’s hard to imagine that once ordered, we could one day receive anything. We also find similar messages on Twitter (X).
Obviously this is amusing here because we can clearly see the absurdity of the situation when an error message can be published without verification. The problem is mainly all the other cases where the attackers’ request worked correctly and the message or product was published with a plausible name.
On social networks, influencers have been able to discover waves of messages in recent weeks which, individually, could have seemed credible. The problem came from the fact that several accounts published the same message to the letter.
How to resolve this situation?
In the case of Amazon, the store can seem to be increasingly drowning in these kinds of products. So how to resolve the situation? We would have to imagine a new type of store which would only stock products that it itself had chosen from catalogues, then which would take care of putting the products online and shipping them. In fact, like any store that does not offer a marketplace.