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Etsy is cracking down on AI slop listings
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Published 10/22/2026 7:09:58 PM
Etsy is cracking down on AI slop listings
Etsy’s new AI policies, among other changes, require that a listing’s first photo is unedited.
Etsy’s new AI policies, among other changes, require that a listing’s first photo is unedited.
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that “many active buyers say they can’t tell which items involve AI-generated content” and that sellers are “concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use AI in misleading ways,” spurring the new policies and restrictions.
Under the new policies, every listing must include “at least one unedited photo of the actual item against a real background,” and all photos must “accurately represent the item a buyer will receive.” The photos that aren’t the first one can be edited with software or AI-powered tools, as long as “the final result remains an accurate representation of the physical product.” The company shared a few examples to demonstrate the type of misleading images that are prohibited, including the cat stuffed animal at the top of this post.
While uploading images for a listing, if Etsy detects that any may be AI-generated, the platform will show a pop-up where you can note if an image was made with AI or not, as shown in a video. If a buyer reports that what they receive is “materially different” from a listing, a seller may be responsible for a refund.
For sellers who offer “functional guides,” which include patterns, recipes, or instructions,” Etsy says that the information in those products “must be your own work, not generated by AI.” Sellers will have to show an “actual result” made from a guide. The company also says that listings made by bots are no longer allowed.
Selling AI-generated art is still allowed on the platform, but a seller must disclose that it was made with AI, Etsy says.
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The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.
Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.
I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.
Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.
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An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Mozilla is updating Smart Window — Firefox’s AI-powered browsing experience — with a new feature that can help you fill out online forms based on your open tabs. As an example, Mozilla says Smart Window can pull information from your online portfolio or LinkedIn page to paste your work history into a job application.
You can try out this feature by clicking into a form with at least four text fields. From there, you’ll see an option to “Fill from sources,” which will show all of the tabs Firefox will draw from. You can then select or deselect tabs that you want Firefox to use, and the browser will generate suggestions based on the information in them. This feature currently supports text fields on web forms, but Mozilla is working to add support for dropdown menus and PDFs. Mozilla notes that data from your source pages is shared with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the AI model that generates the text suggestions.
Along with this update, you can now ask Firefox’s Smart Window to watch a certain webpage for sales, new job listings, and other updates. You can set up a task by typing “/watch” in the Smart Window chat, describing what you’re looking for, and adding the webpages you want to watch. Firefox can then check for updates on a daily or weekly basis, but only when the browser is open.
When Firefox detects the change you’re looking for, it will send you a notification through the Tasks button on the toolbar, or on your desktop (if you have desktop notifications enabled). Firefox will pause watching for updates if it doesn’t detect a change after 60 days, before stopping them completely after 90 days.
Image: Mozilla
These two features are rolling out to the Smart Window beta on desktop in the US and Canada. They’ll be available in other countries in the “coming months.”
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