Is eBay Using AI To Alter Seller Images For External Search? | Selling

valueaddedresource · 2025-09-09T00:20:45.604000Z

I brought this up on a previous thread about eBay Open but for anyone who missed it, during the Q&A at the end of the "Search Best Practices from eBay & Google" session, Senior Manager eBay Advertising, Alan Feder, said that eBay is working on how to use AI to remove seller watermarks to provide a clean image to Google while maintaining the image with watermarks for on eBay search. A seller asked what they can do to protect their IP/make sure others don't steal their photos but not be blocked by Google after earlier comments in the session about how much Google doesn't like watermarks. Here's what Alan said: "We're actually trying to leverage some AI technology between both Google and eBay to say like well if you guys submitted a bunch of pictures with watermarks, we don't want to go back and ask you to correct them, can we correct them ourselves? We keep the watermark version on eBay and then we have a non-watermarked version that we send to Google, so that doesn't get rejected.""So we're trying to mitigate that, but it's absolutely a huge issue with watermarks, logos, text, brand names...anything that's not a picture of the item just don't put on there." Not only did that not really answer the seller's question, it's pretty alarming imo if eBay actually is or is planning to use AI to alter the seller provided image without notification or disclosure to either the seller or (presumably) the buyer. That would present potential IP rights violations and of course could also cause Item Not As Described issues if the AI altered image doesn't exactly and precisely represent the actual item being sold. And today at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, CEO Jamie Iannone appears to have confirmed that eBay is using AI to alter seller images for external search/Offsite Ads. When asked about ads, Jamie said (emphasis mine): "We have the original format we launched ten years agoâ€”promoted listings general, our CPA continues to be our largest contributor to growth. Weâ€™re leaning into new formats like promoted stores and promoted offsite, helping drive new growth.""It's another area where we're able to leverage AI to drive the experience. For example, we're using AI in recommendations and search technologies to drive more relevant listings.""We're able to use it to actually change images for promoted offsite, putting more compelling and compliant images out there to help our sellers promote offsite - buying ads on third parties like Google through eBay - because they're able to leverage all our AI expertise." I asked last month and didn't get a response but I'll try again - @devon@ebay @kyle@ebay @elizabeth@ebay - can you please check with the appropriate team(s) to confirm if eBay is actively altering seller images sent to Google using AI and get more details for us if so?

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