6 ms·
A Bot Is Posting Bizarre Cell Phone Covers on Amazon
- owlninja 9y agoJust a heads up that some of the titles it uses for the cases are NSFW
- deadmik3 9y agooh boy just ordered my new vaginal discomfort iphone case
- ribosometronome 9y agoPersonally, I'm more of a "Worried Teenage Girl in Bedroom With Pregnancy Testing Kit" kind of guy.
- mring33621 9y agoI dunno, I'm leaning toward "Pair of feet with deformed right toe with gout inflammation", which seems more family friendly, for when my kids play golf on my phone.
- russdill 9y agoNot sure if the original link is mobile, but I don't get any product images. Try this one: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=My-Handy-Design https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=My-Ha...
- wlesieutre 9y agoThis has been going on for years. I can't find the particular listing anymore, but I once went searching Amazon for an EnOcean (wireless protocol) motion sensor and found a phone case with a photo of a motion sensor on it. Presumably most of these are never purchased, but they generate thousands of listings and print them on demand if one ever gets an order.
- SyneRyder 9y agoThere was also someone who had a bot that made "Keep Calm And [Random Bot Text]" t-shirts. Unfortunately I can't find the link to the news story about it though. From memory, that one was actually making money.
- simias 9y agoYeah I remember that story as well. The reason it made the news is that the bot went a bit too far at times: http://www.rawstory.com/2013/03/ceo-automated-process-led-to-misogynistic-rape-shirts-on-amazon/ http://www.rawstory.com/2013/03/ceo-automated-process-led-to... You have the same type of listings for hoodies, mugs and many other "consumables" that are cheap to print on demand.
- schoen 9y agoYeah, I wanted to get an RFID-blocking passport wallet and I searched on Amazon, only to find thousands of options (the vast majority of which I assume have never been physically produced) with different slogans in different languages, which looked to be the output of a script that plugged in things into a template. You can see for yourself: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_sa_fashion?url=search-alias%3Dfashion&field-keywords=neonblond+rfid+passport https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_sa_fashion?url=searc... Many of them look quite plausible but if you keep looking you come across bad transliterations from other languages, extremely specific "I [Place|Activity|Relative|Pet]", "World's Hottest [Profession]", and lots more. The most implausible to me is that they have "I love you" in foreign languages but not always using the foreign languages' actual writing system, sometimes using unofficial transliterations. (Although apparently people are willing to get tattoos of this kind of thing, so maybe they're also willing to buy passport holders with it...) I bet this company is still small potatoes compared to the overall scale that the script-assisted product listing game can reach on Amazon. Another thing was a company that produced custom e-books of Wikipedia articles about different Amazon search terms, so if you searched for "hypochondria" or something, they would be selling an e-book about hypochondria, consisting of a print-out of the Wikipedia page about it.
- Jaruzel 9y agoAt some stage we'll hit a tipping point where most posting traffic across the internet is created by bots. Already we're reading bot curated news, looking at bot analysed kitten pictures, and now bot created products. I would love to go back in time and try and convince younger me and co., that this fancy inter-network we're playing with is not actually for us, but for our future bot overlords. -Jarbot
- notyourwork 9y agoStock market is another example of this with HFT.
- chasing 9y agoEventually the internet will just be bots creating content for other bots to consume. And us humans can go outside and find something better to do with our time.
- AgentME 9y agoI have a bot that goes outside and enjoys it for me.
- Apocryphon 9y agoManual labor?
- AJ007 9y agoAt some point, bots will produce more music a week than humans have produced in all of history. Then, when humans go outside and play a real instrument, a bot listening in will deliver a bill for royalties to the song that sounds nearly identical to one they wrote first.
- thomasjudge 9y agoJust in time for Prime Day!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- trevyn 9y agoI wonder if the bizarreness of the images is part of a guerilla marketing attempt to create viral posts like this.
- enthdegree 9y agoNot only that, they seem consistently gross and provocative. I would expect randomly generated covers to be more mundane. This isn't the first the internet has seen something like this. (Remember Horse ebooks?)
- asciimo 9y agoThey may be optimizing for views. These provocative covers may have risen to the top through analytics because people are like "wtf?" click So they make more of those.
- jdietrich 9y agoI very much doubt it. I think the more straightforward explanation is far more likely - that someone has fed an Amazon listings bot with a big library of cheap or pirated stock photos. If you look on any stock photo site, you'll see huge numbers of unusual images with very specific titles. For stock photography, it makes perfect sense; there's a very long tail of articles that need cheap illustration. Healthcare is a very lucrative niche, hence the preponderance of medical images. Obviously this dataset is massively unsuited to this particular purpose, but if the cost of a listing is effectively zero, then there's no real downside to being completely indiscriminate. Given that the seller has listed nearly 32,000 items, I don't think that there's any amount of human decision-making involved.
- hengheng 9y agoFor a publicity stunt you'd have to license the best of /r/wtfstockphotos.
- donatj 9y agoA few years ago I bought some rainbow stickers with the text "Mothman" on them, just because I stumbled across it and it was bizarre. Digging a little further, the seller had basically every word + background combo you could think of. Surely created by a bot and made to order.
- dhartsfield 9y agoMoney laundering, maybe? I mean, Is anybody buying these?
- sharemywin 9y agoif there are 32k you only need 1 in 10000 to and you're selling 3 a day. which if they make 10 a day profit. would be worth the time to make one.
- marchenko 9y agoOne day this is going to happen with someone's stolen boudoir shots and we will witness the first of a new genus of lawsuits.
- bonoetmalo 9y agoSo is this "dada-esque"?
- asciimo 9y agoI was hoping that this was the work of a brilliant artist. But reading the comments suggests it's the work of an automated workflow that optimizes for Amazon's search algorithm. Maybe it's still art.
- diyseguy 9y agoPeople who looked at this one: https://www.amazon.com/Ingrown-toenail-dressing-phone-Samsung/dp/B01C22B98A/ref=pd_day0_107_6?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01C22B98A&pd_rd_r=XMVG178E26MEE5BH56C3&pd_rd_w=ROMnB&pd_rd_wg=eg6iw&psc=1&refRID=XMVG178E26MEE5BH56C3 https://www.amazon.com/Ingrown-toenail-dressing-phone-Samsun... also looked at this one: https://www.amazon.com/Goldblum-Waterproof-Curtain-Curtains-LiangZP/dp/B01N3PNZDI/ref=pd_sbs_107_7?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01N3PNZDI&pd_rd_r=7Q7ZWHCGW75BQS84TWNZ&pd_rd_w=w3gs8&pd_rd_wg=uZelm&psc=1&refRID=7Q7ZWHCGW75BQS84TWNZ https://www.amazon.com/Goldblum-Waterproof-Curtain-Curtains-...
- dddw 9y agomy bet it's somebody his art-project that run awild