I suspect someone was tasked with using the latest tools to improve a bunch of listings. 50 years ago they were given a typewriter for the same task, today they were given an LLM. It just feels like someone doing their job to me. Different year different tool. We no longer hand-transcribing books anymore, we don't lament that, and we won't lament LLMs one day either.
I think the purpose of automating product descriptions is far more likely to be to pay fewer people than to improve the quality of the listings.
I think if the purpose was to improve the quality rather than to crank them out - they probably wouldn't have let such severe and obvious errors get through, certainly not in such a large quantity. If I was tasked with doing this, at a minimum I would kick any listing that contained the word "OpenAI" into a QA queue rather than publishing it. Since they obviously didn't have even the minimal filters to catch errors, I have to infer they never spot checked their output for sanity. Because they didn't really give a shit.
It feels like someone doing their job to me too, sure. That job being to spam. When I see a watch, I infer the existence of a watchmaker. When I see a pile of spam, I infer the existence of a spammer.
What do you think the seller's goal was in employing an LLM? Was it to improve quality, or to drive down costs?