This Amazon bot is making really disturbing phone cases and nobody knows what's going on

AI is exciting, isn’t it? Home assistants! Robots! The future! Who knows what exciting new opportunities will arise as our knowledge of the world grows and blooms? 

Well, I regret to inform you that AI is happening right now and it is not doing a good job of being intelligent at all. Take a look at this, for example: 

So what’s happening here is this: Amazon have created a bot that seemingly scans the internet for stock images. The images are subsequently used on phone cases and listed for sale on their site. 

Sounds like... not that bad an idea? An easy way to generate cool and interesting phone cases? Unfortunately that is not what has happened. 

Instead, the bot has created some fairly horrifying suggestions. Take “varicose veins treatment”, for example. 

This… is not good. I don’t want this phone case.

And they get weirder:

What’s weirder is that nobody seems to know where the photos came from. They’re obviously stock images, but there’s no rhyme or reason to why the images have been selected or what is going on in any way. 

But hey: if, for some bizarre reason, you want to buy a phone case with a picture of an old man in a nappy on it, you can see the whole range here. You weirdo.