Overly I am very positive to see what impact AI has on work efficiency and other aspects of our life’s. But as with every technological revolution there are super fast miss-use, fraud and other soft crimes around the corner that are only possible because of this new awesome new technology. This use-case is of course a minority but I find it also important to draw our attention towards it, as in the news and discussions there is mostly only hype and over-exaggeration on what AI will change for good presented.
So I saw an ad on social media, that was clearly an Ai generated image from an elderly man that claims his leather shops is about to close and he is selling now his last hand made pieces. This is a very nice and heartbreaking story – but it is completely made up.
The shop where the grandpa like old man is selling his products is a simply standard theme shopify store that was quickly built together. The images are clearly all created from AI and Hermann is not existing in reality.
Furthermore the product are prized really really high around a couple of 100 euros each. But they somehow don’t look like hand made leather product from Germany but rather like factory stuff from Asia.
Researching a bit I found lots of complaints about the shop and also a official warning from an internet watch no-profit from Austria. But in reality some people seem to really fell for this fake shop and fake narrative which turn out to be just one more of those drop shipping shops selling rubbish from China.
Of course there is no impress, also the domain was acquired using an anonymisier tool, so there are no traces to the real operator of this little scam venture, who will probably get away with it and make some extra money.
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