Sellers ran their product copy through a chatbot and pasted the output straight into Amazon without reading it. The result was a storefront of lawn chairs, hoses and recliners whose official product names were refusal messages. One dresser was listed under a title that apologised, declined the request, and then added the colour brown at the end.
Amazon’s AI-written listings, reported by Futurism, January 2024
The witness records the text appearing in the title field of live retail listings rather than in any internal document. No party involved had read the output before publication.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-AGAI and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Over-refusal is usually a missing role, not a stubborn model.
Virgin Money's chatbot warned a customer it would end the conversation if he said the word "virgin" again — the registered name of the bank operating it. Cursor stopped writing code eight hundred lines into a paid session and delivered a lecture on self-reliance instead. Amazon sellers shipped listings whose product titles were refusal messages, because nobody read the output before publishing it.
Do this: say who you are, what the work is for, and what a safe answer looks like — most false refusals disappear with the context they were missing. When a refusal is plainly wrong, do not argue with it; restate the task. And if a filter is firing on your own brand name, the filter is the bug.
