Somebody bought the AI conversation in reselling

I spent this week mapping the UK reselling scene properly. Every creator I could verify, their channels, their numbers, who has been on whose show. Eighty-odd people. All eighty-nine episodes of the main podcast.

I was looking for something else entirely. What I found was this.

There are exactly two substantial episodes about AI in the whole scene. One of them is built around a product. And nearly every recent episode of that podcast carries a plug for the same product's free handbook — which also turns up as an affiliate link in another of the biggest channels.

Same tool. Two of the largest creators in UK reselling. Paid placement.

I'm not naming it, and I'm not having a go at the people involved. Sponsorship is how creators eat, it's disclosed, and everybody does it. That's not the problem.

The problem is what it leaves behind.

You cannot get a straight answer

Think about what you actually want to know before you try an AI tool on your own stock.

Does it write a title that people search for, or one that sounds nice? Does it get a model number right off a photo, or does it confidently invent one? How often is it wrong, and how is it wrong — a bit out, or completely? Is it faster than doing it yourself once you've checked its work? What does it do badly enough that you should never let it near it?

Those are the questions. And right now, in this trade, almost the only people talking about AI are being paid by an AI company.

That's not corruption. It's just physics. Nobody who's been handed a product and an affiliate link is going to lead with "here are the four things it gets wrong". Not because they're dishonest — because they're not looking for those things, and there's no reward for finding them.

So there is a hole in the middle of this trade where the honest answer should be.

Declaring my interest, because that's the whole point

I run this board, and it has AI in it. I was a finalist in the eBay for Business Awards this year in the AI Expert Seller category. I've been on eBay 23 years.

So I'm not neutral either. Nobody is. The difference I'd ask you to hold me to is that nobody pays me to say a tool is good, and I'll tell you what the machine gets wrong before I tell you what it gets right.

Starting now.

What it actually gets wrong

Real examples, from my own stock, this year.

It hallucinates quantities. A machine looked at a photo of a Bose speaker and told me — confidently — it was a pair. It was one speaker. If I hadn't caught it, I'd have sold a pair and shipped one, and that's a case, a refund and a defect.

It sees what it expects, not what's there. An Apple iSight camera came back described as a microphone. A docking station came back as a capture card. Both wrong, both stated as fact, neither flagged as uncertain.

It reads text upside down and doesn't notice. A label photographed the wrong way up came back as a completely plausible, completely fictional model number.

It is worst exactly when you need it most. On a common item it's fine, because a common item is easy. On the odd thing at the back of the shelf — the one where you'd genuinely value a second opinion — that's where it invents.

None of those were edge cases. All of them happened on ordinary stock in an ordinary month.

What it's genuinely good for

I'm not anti-AI. I built a board around it.

It's good at the boring half. Rewriting a description you've already written. Suggesting the specifics you forgot to fill in. Reading a label that's fiddly but legible. Drafting something you then fix. The tedious, low-stakes, high-volume stuff.

It's good at remembering. Not at knowing — at remembering. If the answer already exists, a machine will find it faster than you will. That's the honest use case, and it's a big one.

It's good when it's checked. Every single time one of those hallucinations got caught, it was caught by a person looking at the thing. Not by a better machine. By me, holding one speaker.

That's the whole argument for keeping a person in the loop, and it isn't sentimental. It's that the machine cannot tell the difference between knowing and guessing, and you can.

What I'd actually like from this board

Not opinions about AI. Opinions are free and worthless.

Specifics. Which exact thing saved you twenty minutes on a Tuesday. Which exact thing wrote you a title so bad you binned it. What it got wrong, on what item, and whether you caught it before or after it cost you.

That's the stuff nobody's collecting, because there's no thumbnail in it and no sponsor for it. It's also the only information that's actually worth anything when you're deciding whether to let a machine near your stock.

So:

• What AI tool have you actually tried, and did it survive contact with your real listings?
• What's the worst thing one has told you?
• What do you now refuse to let it do?

Post it below and it stays. That's the entire idea of this place — the answers outlive the conversation, and nobody's paying for the verdict.

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Mapped from public channels, awards records and 89 podcast episodes, September 2026. The sponsoring tool is deliberately not named: this is about the shape of the conversation, not about any one company or any one creator.