A Bot Is Posting Bizarre Cell Phone Covers on Amazon | Hacker News Reader

A Bot Is Posting Bizarre Cell Phone Covers on Amazon

amazon.com

95 pointsalangibson38 comments

This has been going on for years. I can't find the particular listing anymore, but I once went searching Amazon for an EnOcean (wireless protocol) motion sensor and found a phone case with a photo of a motion sensor on it.

Presumably most of these are never purchased, but they generate thousands of listings and print them on demand if one ever gets an order.

There was also someone who had a bot that made "Keep Calm And [Random Bot Text]" t-shirts. Unfortunately I can't find the link to the news story about it though. From memory, that one was actually making money.

Yeah I remember that story as well. The reason it made the news is that the bot went a bit too far at times: http://www.rawstory.com/2013/03/ceo-automated-process-led-to...

You have the same type of listings for hoodies, mugs and many other "consumables" that are cheap to print on demand.

Yeah, I wanted to get an RFID-blocking passport wallet and I searched on Amazon, only to find thousands of options (the vast majority of which I assume have never been physically produced) with different slogans in different languages, which looked to be the output of a script that plugged in things into a template.

You can see for yourself:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_sa_fashion?url=searc...

Many of them look quite plausible but if you keep looking you come across bad transliterations from other languages, extremely specific "I [Place|Activity|Relative|Pet]", "World's Hottest [Profession]", and lots more.

The most implausible to me is that they have "I love you" in foreign languages but not always using the foreign languages' actual writing system, sometimes using unofficial transliterations. (Although apparently people are willing to get tattoos of this kind of thing, so maybe they're also willing to buy passport holders with it...)

I bet this company is still small potatoes compared to the overall scale that the script-assisted product listing game can reach on Amazon.

Another thing was a company that produced custom e-books of Wikipedia articles about different Amazon search terms, so if you searched for "hypochondria" or something, they would be selling an e-book about hypochondria, consisting of a print-out of the Wikipedia page about it.

The weird part about these is that they're listed as prime and shipped and sold by Amazon. Is there some way to list on demand products that way?

I'm hoping there isn't and someone realizing the premium for prime/FBA products produced a ton of them after picking designs algorithmically and shipped them to Amazon.

Somewhere, in an Amazon warehouse near you, there is a Samsung S3 infected toe phone cover. What a time to be alive.

Yes, Amazon now offers Seller Fulfilled Prime. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html/?itemID=2... (need to be logged into a seller account to see this page.

"Seller Fulfilled Prime allows you to list your products as Prime-eligible and handle the fulfillment yourself. You can display the Prime badge on the products you already ship directly to customers with 2-day shipping and free standard shipping. There is no fee to enroll in Seller Fulfilled Prime.

Before you can participate, you must satisfy performance requirements during a trial period to demonstrate that you can meet customers' service expectations. After successfully completing the trial, you're automatically enrolled in the program."

At some stage we'll hit a tipping point where most posting traffic across the internet is created by bots. Already we're reading bot curated news, looking at bot analysed kitten pictures, and now bot created products. I would love to go back in time and try and convince younger me and co., that this fancy inter-network we're playing with is not actually for us, but for our future bot overlords.

-Jarbot

Stock market is another example of this with HFT.

Eventually the internet will just be bots creating content for other bots to consume. And us humans can go outside and find something better to do with our time.

I have a bot that goes outside and enjoys it for me.

I have a bot that feeds my dog. I don't need to interact anymore!

As documented in the 'film' Surrogates:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/

Manual labor?

At some point, bots will produce more music a week than humans have produced in all of history. Then, when humans go outside and play a real instrument, a bot listening in will deliver a bill for royalties to the song that sounds nearly identical to one they wrote first.

"play a real instrument"

Does that mean yelling at my Alexa to play a Spotify track? It's the only interpretation that makes sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_background_noise

Just a heads up that some of the titles it uses for the cases are NSFW

I wonder if the bizarreness of the images is part of a guerilla marketing attempt to create viral posts like this.

Not only that, they seem consistently gross and provocative. I would expect randomly generated covers to be more mundane.

This isn't the first the internet has seen something like this. (Remember Horse ebooks?)

They may be optimizing for views. These provocative covers may have risen to the top through analytics because people are like "wtf?" click So they make more of those.

I very much doubt it. I think the more straightforward explanation is far more likely - that someone has fed an Amazon listings bot with a big library of cheap or pirated stock photos. If you look on any stock photo site, you'll see huge numbers of unusual images with very specific titles. For stock photography, it makes perfect sense; there's a very long tail of articles that need cheap illustration. Healthcare is a very lucrative niche, hence the preponderance of medical images. Obviously this dataset is massively unsuited to this particular purpose, but if the cost of a listing is effectively zero, then there's no real downside to being completely indiscriminate.

Given that the seller has listed nearly 32,000 items, I don't think that there's any amount of human decision-making involved.

For a publicity stunt you'd have to license the best of /r/wtfstockphotos.

People who looked at this one: https://www.amazon.com/Ingrown-toenail-dressing-phone-Samsun...

also looked at this one: https://www.amazon.com/Goldblum-Waterproof-Curtain-Curtains-...

Not sure if the original link is mobile, but I don't get any product images. Try this one: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=My-Ha...

I was hoping that this was the work of a brilliant artist. But reading the comments suggests it's the work of an automated workflow that optimizes for Amazon's search algorithm. Maybe it's still art.

oh boy just ordered my new vaginal discomfort iphone case

Personally, I'm more of a "Worried Teenage Girl in Bedroom With Pregnancy Testing Kit" kind of guy.

Sign me up for the ingrown toenail case

But have you seen Woman In Underwear Masturbating While Lying On Bed?

I dunno, I'm leaning toward "Pair of feet with deformed right toe with gout inflammation", which seems more family friendly, for when my kids play golf on my phone.

A few years ago I bought some rainbow stickers with the text "Mothman" on them, just because I stumbled across it and it was bizarre.

Digging a little further, the seller had basically every word + background combo you could think of. Surely created by a bot and made to order.

So is this "dada-esque"?

One day this is going to happen with someone's stolen boudoir shots and we will witness the first of a new genus of lawsuits.

Just in time for Prime Day!

Money laundering, maybe? I mean, Is anybody buying these?

if there are 32k you only need 1 in 10000 to and you're selling 3 a day. which if they make 10 a day profit. would be worth the time to make one.

my bet it's somebody his art-project that run awild

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