AI: Empowering the Scammers ⊹₊⟡
Honestly Etsy worries me a lot lately- if you browse like I do, no doubt you've noticed the absolute sea of AI slop taking over. Real creators are getting pushed to page 6+ and losing sales to fake AI listings. Some even have best seller tags! I see more and more people getting scammed, and declaring they'll "never shop at Etsy again" after a bad experience. There's no way this ends well for Etsy and I don't know what they're thinking.
It’s not just limited to crochet either- beading, cross stitch, sewing patterns, every craft is a target for these slop scams. They’re both stealing real artist's’ pictures and feeding them through AI, or generating absolute nonsense from thin air.
As someone who's bought and sold on Etsy for 12+ years, this just makes me sad and angry. The most we can do is leave these stores 1 star if you do get ripped off! Warn others, be specific, show pictures- they often have fake 5 star reviews to try to look legit. But they just keep popping up, and Etsy keeps happily taking their $15 fee. They’ve never been a perfect platform, but this has gotten egregious and they’ve made it clear they don’t care about maintaining trust or quality.
My AI-awareness tips:
If you haven't checked out Ravelry before, I highly recommend it. They actually moderate uploads, and are staunchly anti-ai content. I've been on there for years, it's a great platform focused on fiber art patterns!
Check out the store's age. Is it 1 month old with tons of listings? Sus! Do they exist anywhere else on the internet?
For beginners, it can be hard to tell what's real and what's fake.
Really zoom in on the photos- are there loose fibers/fuzz/natural imperfections, or does it look like it was made from playdough? (Though these pictures keep getting better) Are there any customer pictures of it successfully made?
For beads: can you actually make out individual beads or does it look like corn on the cob?
For cross stitch or tapestry: did anyone actually make this with string or is it a hard pixel image superimposed over a fabric?
Is there any cohesion to their products/photos/style; does stuff look like it all came from the same maker, or is it all over the place? Do they somehow have many different Vogue runway models showing off their products?
Don’t follow Facebook ads. Their platform is also completely out of control and unmoderated. People are literally getting payment methods stolen by sketchy third-party “pattern” websites.
I need to clarify: AI is not capable of writing or designing patterns. It will give you an output that looks very convincing at first glance, but it is just giving you a mess of tubes and balls if you’re lucky. Do not waste your time struggling to understand or follow an AI pattern. AI is not an intelligence- it’s a generative “Large Language Model” and all it does is guess what words or pixels come next.
Tips for Sellers:
Don’t use AI tools in your photos. At all. No, not even to “make it look professional” or “just add a background”. It’s misleading and dishonest if you’re excessively cleaning up your work, and only contributes to undermining customers’ ability to tell what’s real and what’s fake.
In this brave (exhausting) new world, integrity and honesty is more important than high end studio-quality photography. Keep it real: anything you make entirely by yourself will always be more impressive than anything coming from a generative slot machine.
Stay safe out there on the internet and support real artists. Share these tips if you found them helpful!
-Tibbles
