Amazon AI Tool Offers Merchants’ Products Without Their Consent

Sometime around Christmas, Sarah Burzio noticed that the holiday sales bump for her stationery business included some mysterious new customers: a flurry of orders from anonymous email addresses associated with Amazon.com Inc.

Burzio, who doesn’t sell her products on the retail giant’s site, soon discovered that Amazon had duplicated her product listings and made purchases on behalf of Amazon customers under email addresses that read like gibberish followed by buyforme.amazon.

“I didn’t worry about, it to be honest,” she said. “We were getting customers.”

Then people started complaining. Amazon’s listings, automatically generated by an experimental artificial intelligence tool, didn’t always correspond to ...