AI generating false positive flags is not a new experience for me. It first starting showing up in 2023 in the freelance writing industry, ironically damaging newer, younger writers disproportionately because of the way they had been taught to write in school. Those of us who were taught in the 1980s and earlier had no problem with AI mainly because our style of writing pre-dated many of the models AI bots were using when first launched. That might have changed over the last year or two as they have become far more proliferant, but AI bots definitely had no issue with older writers.

This kind of false positive is known in the coding world as a logic error versus a syntax or technical one. Generally, the assumptions used to drive the program are faulty. So, while the program itself may compile fine, its application doesn't make sense. As a result, younger writers were getting killed with AI accusations of 60 and 70% plagiarism or AI-written material while older writers were barely cracking 5% at best. None of it eventually mattered though; by 2004 AI writing in general, as bad as it was, had decimated the freelance writing market because clients just wanted free service over experienced writing that cost money. Go figure.

Now, I'm seeing the same kind of faulty logic nonsense showing up in the e-commerce world for second-hand selling. I've had my eBay and Mercari accounts for quite a while, so I haven't had issues there. However, when trying to expand my inventory to new platforms like Vinted, within one listing I'm flagged for selling counterfeit product and banned entirely, all in the space of 10 minutes. WTF. What happened? Somewhere, somehow, some kind of AI algorithm decided I was flagged and nuked me without even any human review to confirm what was going on. Well, guess what, it didn't hurt me, but it sure created a major income loss for Vinted. Now, they won't get my business via fees or selling, but they do have my experience being shared with everyone else as to how AI is screwing over e-commerce without anyone paying attention.

Is this AI thing isolated? Apparently not. In trying to avoid the same waste of time, I've been researching what other platforms are literally letting AI run their business filtering sellers. It turns out quite a few. TikTok Selling, ThredUp, Depop, RealReal and similar are all relying on AI to replace human brains and choose who can sell on their platform and who cannot. However, just like the writers, who controls the standards that define what gets flagged? Apparently, its whatever knucklehead wrote the AI program without knowing what they were talking about.

What criteria might get an account banned? The platforms use language such as counterfeit brand, no brands listed, multiple listing and similar. In reality, they punish sellers who don't sell products from recognized brands, they punish accounts connected by VPN or Wi-Fi, and they zap accounts supposedly mislead buyers with information that doesn't match their predetermined list of what products should look like. So, in my case of selling a European soccer jersey, how the hell would they know the brand name, the sizing or product, and other criteria when the product was never created or manufactured in the US? Well, they wouldn't, of course. So, their buyers lose out to faulty AI logic, and small businesses like mine lose out on new markets.

Even if AI is proven to be a poor account manager, it still gets used in many cases. Why? Simple, the same reason drives the dumb use of it as it did with writing platforms; it's cheap or almost free. Having a human actually check things cost money in labor. And a good analyst working fulltime is expensive, to the tune of $50,000 to $90,000 a year. If an AI account can do the same for $50/month, who cares if it makes a lot of mistakes, right? 

Fortunately, I've been around long enough on other platforms that I'm a known commodity. Again, that old user category works to my advantage just like when I was a writer. But seriously, this AI thing deciding everything for businesses without some common sense applied will literally bankrupt companies and do worse to small businesses trying to get a start online through such platforms. They might as well create their own page and say to hell with third party tools altogether. It's a good think in my case I actually know how to do that. Maybe I should start a business helping folks create their own turn-key selling platform pages in one package to replace AI options altogether. Hmm....