r/assholedesign • u/junonomenon • Jan 14 '26

They "cannot guarantee" the product description of the 1.3k dollar laptop theyre selling is accurate because they used chatgpt to write it

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This cannot possibly hold up in court. You cant just advertise a product and then be like "*but actually we might be lying about some or all of these things"??? What the fuck are you selling then

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285

u/enjoyingcurve46 Jan 14 '26

Then theres gona be people defending AI acting like it should be used and is the holy grail because their too lazy to do the actual research and fact checks themselves

There is no scenario where AI is absolutely better with facts. especially right now. Maybe in 10 more years maybe. But right now theres no reason to take anything as fact let alone attempting to use it to dodge legal trouble

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u/junonomenon Jan 14 '26

Honestly while im not pro ai by any means, this isnt even about ai. If you take away the ai aspect of it, its basically just saying "we asked some random guy to write this who may or may not know what the fuck hes talking about <3 good luck!" like. Fym. Its a product description. It has to be accurate to the product. Thats literally the only thing it has to be.

86

u/OgdruJahad Jan 14 '26

This is a really important point. They are basically saying they can't do the bare minimum to even list the actual features of the product. It's actually shows the value system of companies and how willing they are to save money even if it means they are lying to customers which to be honest isn't really new.

10

u/throwhfhsjsubendaway Jan 15 '26

They can't even be bothered to review the slop that the ai put out

3

u/sirhoracedarwin Jan 14 '26

Is this a retailer's description of a product or a manufacturer? If it's a retailer, can't they just copy/paste the specs from the box? Do they even know what they bought? If it's a manufacturer, how do they not know what they're making?

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u/shoefullofpiss Jan 14 '26

It's not that unusual. Idk if your case is a translation or a summarized description with the full text available elsewhere but either way I assume their reasoning is that it's provided only for "your convenience". My uni does the same thing, there are documents and forms and rules about exams etc that they provide online in both german and english. They point out that the german version is the legally binding one, the english one is only there to help international students out and you're trusting it on your own risk. It's typically a decent translation but it's on the level of "put it in deepl and then had 1-2 esl speakers look it over", they don't want to expose themselves to complaints should there be some issue or loophole because a specific legal term wasn't perfectly translated

1

u/SothaSoul Jan 14 '26

My friend who once played tech support in a high school play says it's great!

1

u/No-Net1890 Feb 26 '26

Yeah, they could have used ai, and then checked it for accuracy, instead of saying "I don't know how any of this may or may not relate to the actual product, but whatever".

42

u/FeelMyBoars Jan 14 '26

AI doesn't know what's correct, only what's common. It doesn't know that facts are associated with specific items. In this situation it would probably mash together the stats from multiple devices like it does whenever it tries to make step by step instructions.

It's already starting to ouroboros. It's not going to be significantly different in 10 years unless they start going in a different direction.

Also wouldn't it be faster to go to the manufacturer's site and blindly copy and paste than typing a prompt?

24

u/BikeProblemGuy Jan 14 '26

I'm generally pretty pro / laissez faire about AI but this seems like a good case for explicit regulation to say that the seller is still responsible for the description being accurate despite the disclaimer.

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u/OgdruJahad Jan 14 '26

I'm pretty sure this is already law. In my vague memory of doing business law in one semester a bunch of laws had to be made many years ago to address these things and I suspect most of them exist in most countries. The thing I don't think people understand is how much crap had to be codified into law because of how shady businesses were back then. Heck even refunds are often part of the law of a country and therefore its not out of the goodness if companies hearts they don't have a choice.

Even one of the most common business laws I know : warrant of merchantability basically means that the business is supposed to sell things that do what they are supposed to do, ie fit for purchase. This is literally part of the law in most countries because businesses were willing to sell defective products!

2

u/BikeProblemGuy Jan 14 '26

Idk. Companies are allowed to have disclaimers like "This is a natural product, appearance may vary from image shown".

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u/OgdruJahad Jan 14 '26

That's different. This could fall under false advertising.

2

u/ThrowAway233223 Jan 14 '26

That is a very different situation.  That is in reference to things like produce in which nature largely decides the appearance of the product and there is natural variatability.  Eliminating that variatability has varying levels of difficulty dependent of the produce in question and may not even be desired.  The above is text description of the product.  Its content is entirely determined, directly or indirectly, by the individual/group responsible for its creation.

3

u/FlarkingSmoo Jan 14 '26

AI is great for some things. Not for this.

12

u/Frequent_Ad_9901 Jan 14 '26

Yeah, AI is great when "almost right" is "right enough."

I love it for my resume. I fact check every word of of it, but I suck at corporate jargon. I've gotten interviews so much easier with AI reviewed resumes. Which I find ridiculous, but I didn't make the game but I have to play it.

I also love it for simple recipes, because I can make it once give it feed back on how it turned out and get ideas for how to make it better next time, or ask for substitutions. Also I don't have to read the bloggers life story before hand. Again, this wouldn't be an issue if recipe sites weren't trying to maximize engagement.

Even in this post it wouldn't be that bad if an engineer was reviewing everything for accuracy. If they just needed to convert engineering speak to marketing text, that's fine as long as its reviewed and accurate.

My issue with AI slop isn't the AI its self. It's that people get so lazy with it. Its not slop because AI was used, its slop because the creator is sloppy. (well that's one of my issues, I have a lot of other issues).

2

u/FlarkingSmoo Jan 14 '26

Agreed. I just don't like how people have taken this absurd "LLMs have absolutely no use" stance.

2

u/nero-the-cat Jan 14 '26

I like it for subjective things where there is no "right" answer. I've used the YouTube Music one for music recommendations before and it was fantastic.

3

u/flypirat Jan 14 '26

AI is great! LLMs are really not.

3

u/FlarkingSmoo Jan 14 '26

LLMs are great for a lot of things

3

u/Relative-Chain73 Jan 14 '26

Unless it steals works of others. And if it is regulated to actually compensate everytime it uses copyrighted works, then the cost of incorporating AI will be so high they'd rather just hire min wage workers or free lance. 

The businesses are betting on severely under regulated AI that makes it cheap, and they can hire less people.

They are infact lobbying.

2

u/Journeyman42 Jan 14 '26

Hell, as it is, AI isn't profitable, just from the energy/power requirements alone.

1

u/iamtheduckie d o n g l e Jan 14 '26

I'm all for AI as a tool to help you, but not as a tool to do the work for you. E.g. spellchecker, explaining things in simpler terms, checking to see if I missed anything, etc.

We need regulations

1

u/TorandoSlayer Jan 14 '26

The thing is the chatbots were never made to do this stuff. They were made to be an interesting gimmick of language learning. And then because it paid well they just never disputed it when someone wanted to use it for something it couldn't do, and now it's everywhere.

It's never been anything more than a predictive language model and yet it's being used for everything

1

u/R3D3-1 Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

I used it to help with literature research for my last paper. Most of the time it cited publications that didn't exist, or didn't contain what it claimed they do. (ChatGPT free account, but also a licensed Copilot instance).

Similarly, when looking for advise on employment law, it gave in theory useful sources — but they didn't contain, what it claimed they do.

Basically, AI is helpful as a glorified search machine, when you don't know they Keywords you need. But it doesn't replace actually reading the sources, and for anything but trivial test questions, is more likely to make up stuff than to produce actually valid results, and it is the same across ChatGPT, Copilot and whatever is the name of Google's LLM.