Featured Image Credit: Sambucha / YouTube
Most of us scroll past AI-generated ads thinking 'Yeah, that’s fake' and move on.
But not YouTuber Sambucha, who's been experimenting with AI a lot recently, so much so that he replaced himself with AI to see if anyone would notice.
Instead, the content creator spent a tonne of money just to see if any products would show up, or if they were just scams.
Sambucha browsed through an AI-generated product ads page on Instagram and reverse image searched the photos on Google to see what he could find.
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The first product he went for was a massive gorilla couch. After putting the product image in Google's reverse image search, he found a seller on Etsy offering different animal-themed couches.
Instantly, he spent a whopping $1,600 on the gorilla variant despite the shop having zero reviews or sales.
Expecting the product to be a total scam, Sambucha was shocked when the couch actually arrived two months later. "I ordered this couch two months ago. For the longest time, I thought this was a complete scam. But it turns out it actually wasn't," he said.
The 'aboslute beast of a couch' measured up to what Sambucha estimated to be around seven feet tall after he fully inflated it. "What you're looking at is not a scam," he excitedly told his viewers.
Despite it not being very 'comfortable' and potentially made with 'real gorilla fur,' Sambucha was overall impressed with his enormous purchase. "This is worth every single cent of $1,500 and worth every single minute of a two month wait," he added.
The next product was a 'semi-truck coffee mug,' that looked just believable enough to exist - if you look past the AI ad. "I thought this was cool and actually think it exists," the YouTuber said.
After finding several profiles on Amazon selling the supposed cup, he ordered one for $20. However, when it arrived, it turned out to be nothing more than a regular cup printed with some generic AI art.
"Upon further inspection, it's definitely not as AI-y in the graphics," he described. "I guess I'm not completely scammed," he said before trying the cup out and describing that it felt like 'sticky' and 'used.'
But he'd seen nothing yet.
One AI ad offered couples the chance to rent a baby for up to eight weeks - for $5,000. Though it seemed like something you'd find on the deep web, Sambucha purchased a 'baby' for $100. What showed up was a terrifying blue-skinned ''baby' that looked like it was out of James Cameron's Avatar, Sambucha exclaimed.
"It feels so real," he said, completely freaked out. "It looks like a vacuum-sealed baby."
Other product disasters he purchased were a toilet-theme slow cooker that turned out to be a 'waste of a product' and a supposed cat bed that arrived as a scaled-down, Wish version that was clearly made for cats instead of humans.
Viewers were just as shocked at the products.
"The biggest shock of the video was the mug being a scam while the 7 ft ape chair was real," one YouTube user replied while another added: ""Never trust an AI" is the best motivation."
All in all, this video has convinced me to steer clear of buying anything remotely AI-looking in fear of what might be delivered.
