eBay's AI Descriptions Are Not Ready For Primetime

I don’t use it here or on YouTube, but I believe, when used right, generative AI can be a valuable tool. eBay’s AI item descriptions, though, rarely ever provide value.

Take this example:

Count the errors! They’re not limited to my highlighted portion.

How does this happen?

eBay isn’t using an LLM that’s trained on sports card data. They’re actually just using the data the seller feeds it from the “Item Specifics” section. The example above is for an 1887 Allen & Ginter N28 Annie Oakley card, one I want very much:

The AI description appears to just be taking from this section, most of which I left out because it’s accurate and I wanted to focus on the mistakes.

The seller mistakenly entered Annie Oakley as a Major League Baseball player, and the description snagged that and ran with it. I’m no expert, but it seems to me like a good genAI model wouldn’t rely on sellers to enter correct information; it would be trained on a lot of data instead of one listing.

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Graig and I are really hitting our stride with Surface Issues. Here’s our latest:

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This was a fun one:

This was a highlight, too:

Ron and I had been talking about doing that since summer. He’s such a great guy.

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