Over the summer (I'm sure it started much earlier, but the big push was over the summer, right about the time things went sideways for a lot of sellers), eBay started putting in place artificial intelligence (AI) in a very big way to supposedly improve site functions and sales. Unfortunately AI is still in its infancy and lacks the intuition or understanding of real humans.
So, for example, AI is now being used to confirm that the scans that are supposed to be made by actual human postal workers (who are quite fallible) are actually made. When the scan isn't done, AI alerts the eBay system and a seller is given a defect for not uploading tracking on time. I know this for a fact because I personally spent the better part of a week trying to reach a human to point out the scan had been missed and the defect needed to be removed. I spoke to nine different people until I finally reached a human with normal intelligence who could see from the tracking information that the first two USPS scans had been missed entirely by the postal worker, but the package had gone through the system normally and been delivered on time. The customer service agent removed the defect immediately.
In another instance, regarding a neutral feedback that had been received, the AI "decided" the feedback didn't violate policy and bounced back a message saying it wouldn't be removed. Again, many phone calls later, an actual human took a look at the transaction, the communications between myself and the buyer, and immediately removed the feedback.
Finally, all of the weird search issues we're having, such as messed up sorting, items being missed in the searches, and incorrectly advertising for items as the "great price" item when far less expensive identical items are available are the direct result of poorly functioning artificial intelligence. The AI is sorting according to an indexing system that doesn't appear to be compatible with the manner in which it functions. A million years ago when eBay began, databases were created and items were indexed according to the terms in the thesaurus for that database. Over time the databases have grown and the indexing has become increasingly more complicated, but it has still basically worked reasonably well until recently. In eBay's attempt to pare down the need for humans and become more efficient, it has implemented an artificial intelligence system that is still in its infancy. That system is supposed to be better than humans at creating and maintaining this system, but it's just not there yet so our items get lost in the abyss and the gibberish that has been created.
AI is here and it is the way of the future, but right now it pretty much sucks. Watch Joe Rogan's most recent conversation with Elon Musk (one of the pioneers of the movement), and you'll see it takes even him four tries to get the AI that he himself is using and working on four tries to get the system to do what he wants it to.
