u/BaptisteNo

Hi redditors! I came across something completely WTF on Instagram this week.

It's the account of a young woman with Down syndrome who sews dresses, and the work is seriously impressive.

She posts videos of herself at the machine, it all looks super realistic and super clean, and she sends everyone to her store. Hundreds of thousands of followers.

Except she doesn't exist. Neither do the dresses, at least not the handmade part.

I dug a bit and she's fully AI generated, the dresses are dropshipped, and once you start looking you find tons of accounts like this. AFP already looked into it back in June, and it's blowing up.

To me it's completely out of line and I'm not telling anyone to do this. But it does show how hard AI can hit ecommerce, and I think there's still room for brands to stand out with it without treating people like idiots.

No idea where the line's going to sit for the rest of us using AI in our stores, so I'd love to hear where you'd draw it.

Hi redditors! I came across a news this week that might interest you.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, and on September 17 the court unsealed a pile of their internal documents.

Microsoft measured what happens when people use Copilot instead of regular Bing search. Clicks to the New York Times' site dropped by up to 93%, and the Microsoft researcher behind those numbers called it a "doom loop" for the web.

An OpenAI engineer put it even more bluntly back in 2023: "no matter how prominently we show the links, users won't click."

A lot of us have watched our organic traffic slide and couldn't really say why, and now there's data from inside the companies doing it.

Hard to know yet how much of this carries over to our own sites, so I'm curious what you all think.

Hi redditors! I came across a Meta news this week that might interest you.

On September 25 a jury in New Mexico ruled that Meta deceived the public 43.9 million times, over what it said about user data, misinformation and hate speech. The fine can go up to 219 billion dollars.

One of those statements is Zuckerberg's from 2010: "We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone." The jury found it misleading, since letting advertisers reach you through your data is pretty much what we all pay for.

It's not the first time an ad platform gets caught doing shady stuff with our data.

Hard to know what this changes in Meta's rules, so I'm curious what you all think.