Are the products in your shopping cart real?
The Indicator from Planet Money
NPR
4.7 • 9.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today on the show, we talk to an expert in digital forensics about how AI-generated merchandise is only likely to become more common, and what ought to be done to help prevent unethical sellers from abusing the technology.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | NPR. So recently a son sayyad is scrolling through his Instagram feed, you know like we do |
| 0:16.3 | scroll scroll scroll scroll and then suddenly he stops his eyes come to rest on an ad for a |
| 0:21.8 | jacket but not just any jacket a beautiful come to rest on an ad for a jacket. |
| 0:22.6 | But not just any jacket, a beautiful bomber jacket covered in this eye-catching puffy cloud design. |
| 0:30.3 | I would say like the main base color of it is like pink and there's like blue and |
| 0:34.4 | purple and yellows and a lot of quilting. Now normally a son says he's not a flashy |
| 0:40.8 | dresser but man this jacket it just looks so good. So when he sees the ad for it again, just a few days later, he goes for it. |
| 0:48.4 | I was like, okay, maybe this is my calling to just own this jacket. It looks really cool. |
| 0:52.2 | So he clicks through, it takes him to a website called |
| 0:55.0 | C.C. mom. And he places an order. |
| 0:59.0 | I was like for $40 something that looks this nice, this is awesome, right? And never at any point entered my |
| 1:07.9 | head that this might be some sort of an attempt at a scam. |
| 1:12.1 | Yeah, Sun feels like he got scammed because in the end, |
| 1:16.0 | the jacket he received looked nothing like it did on the website. |
| 1:20.0 | And in fact, Hassan would later come to suspect that the picture of the jacket he saw online |
| 1:24.4 | was not a photo of an actual product, but an image completely fabricated with AI. |
| 1:30.0 | This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. |
| 1:33.6 | And I'm Whelan Wong. |
| 1:34.8 | According to AI experts, |
| 1:36.9 | Asan has reason to be suspicious. |
| 1:39.3 | That's because more than ever before, |
| 1:41.9 | sellers are using AI generated images of products to entice consumers. |
... |
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