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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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There are a horde of bots, most commonly plaguing Twitter and Reddit, that exist solely to note highly upvoted posts on certain topics, usually with an image attached, and then post listings of said image applied to merchandise.

Someone posts a popular webcomic? A dozen shifty online stores print it on a t-shirt. Piece of obscure fan art? It costs nothing to have an automated pipeline photoshop it onto shirts, mugs, patches and the like, many legitimate sellers use templates themselves. If the business is so kind as to deliver the goods when someone purchases them, they're usually putting out tiny print orders to third parties and don't have to worry about stock or depreciation, let alone intellectual property rights.

And these days, with AI image gen, it takes about all of a second to rustle up a picture of Current Thing, if one doesn't conveniently exist.

I think there's a decent chance that some bot came across the names of the kids in an online context and decided to spin up a few items that are nominally child-related, or maybe it misfired even worse and put them on furniture and pizza.

At the very least it's not going to be an online pedo ring, so everything else is much more likely.

So how would the prices be derived with these bots? Certainly 3kUSD is far beyond print cost.

I have no idea, NFTs, at this point, are purely products for suckers, and I imagine most of them aren't that price sensitive, and some might even think that a higher listing price makes them more valuable.

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