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Oh wow, Maggie. You could swap out William Morris for Kusama and this was my story beat for beat. Honestly. Thank you for writing this up, it makes me feel way less naive and gullible if they were able to trick you as well. I agree with your conclusion; this is all going to hell so quickly.

The amount of ai pieces has to already outnumber legit & hand created ones. Etsy could fight it by say limiting the volume of listings one store can have, but they don’t want to be Etsy anymore; they want to be EBay/SHEIN.

There’s an entire genre of YouTube hustle that’s focused on teaching people how to ai generate digital art by the thousands and flood Etsy with the listings. It’s probably the most popular “make thousands overnight with this one weird trick” topic right now.

Ugh, that's so fucking depressing. I hate that it's working, too. Gutting culture to make a quick buck used to be reserved for record label executives and their ilk. I might be happy for this new wealth distribution if it didn't kill the culture 100x faster.

I love opportunities for anyone to create value but the whole sell here has been how to make money w/o doing any valuable work. Feed PDFs to AI & generate audio books & podcasts! Upload AI cookbooks & coloring books, etc. It’s like printing out your Google search results to sell them.

It really is depressing because it’s selling only the illusion of value rather than anything valuable. And it’s everywhere because when only volume matters, curation works against the model. I bought a “highly rated” garlic press on Amazon that shattered on 1st use. 100% junk.