Etsy Bans Bot Listings and AI Guides Under New Rules

Etsy is shaking up its handmade marketplace to fight a massive wave of fake and AI-generated listings. On October twenty-second, the company dropped new rules targeting bot-generated products and AI-created patterns and recipes. Sellers now have to post at least one real, unaltered photo of the actual item on a normal background. If you are selling guides like recipes, you also have to show a real physical result made from those exact instructions. CEO Kruti Patel Goyal told investors that human creativity matters even more now that AI makes copying things so easy. But enforcing these new limits is going to be messy. A business professor at Boston University pointed out that handmade is very hard to define and even harder to check at scale. Etsy is not banning AI entirely though, because the platform still uses it for product recommendations and detection tools.