AI-Generated Junk Is Flooding Etsy

According to the amateur online-business advisers of YouTube, the age of easily accessible AI is the age of asking and receiving. ChatGPT and other AI tools are ascendant in popular culture, as is the idea that you can ask them for anything. You can even ask them to make you rich.

Joshua Mayo, a YouTube personality who makes videos about work-from-home “side hustles” and methods for becoming a millionaire before age 30, told me recently that his audience of mostly young people doesn’t want to work a standard 9-to-5 job for several decades and then retire off of their 401(k). “A lot of them don’t find that appealing,” he said. “So they’re kind of turning to side hustles.” Younger generations often talk about the total fakeness of money and the surreal position of always having to collect it. Logically, they want to make money online by creating something out of nothing. And with the help of AI, they can even make money by making nothing out of nothing.

“A lot of my videos now have some type of AI, he explains that images created with Midjourney can be made in seconds and sold as digital downloads on Etsy—a way to tap into the “multimillion-dollar market” of clip art. Incidentally, this is one of the first ideas that ChatGPT gave me when I asked it to give me 10 ideas for online businesses: “The ideas stage is actually perfect for AI,” Mayo confirmed. “You can ask the AI to give you ideas for products to sell on Etsy and it will spit out a big list for you.”