Also let’s be real for a second.
If you can’t describe what influenced the yoyo, the design decisions you made, and what inspired you to create the yoyo in the first place, why the hell are you releasing it?
I want to read about the origins, backstory, and all the minute details that went into the creation of the yoyo, not some slop about how it’s the next big thing and going to “change yoyo”.
Right but they also run brick and mortar stores and contests, workshops, events, social media, and various other side projects in the community including dealing with stuff like this forum. It’s a small team. 1-2 hours is allot of time to burn for a small business if it can be automated out and not impact the company. Just play devils advocate here but there’s allot of cool stuff they try to do but can’t because there’s only so many hours a week.
Yeah that’s not yye job though that’s the company dropping the yoyo…
except YYE AI summarizes the description even if you provide it for them lol
so the details get slop-ified
I generally expect product descriptions on commerce sites to be somewhere between anodyne to vaguely positive. These aren’t supposed to be reviews.
I’m reading them for interesting facts about the people behind them or any specific design features or inspiration. But that is my perspective, as someone who has read a zillion of these and can skim away the parts that aren’t of interest.
As to why make yet another yo-yo if there is nothing original about it? Just the general turnover in stock, brands themselves, cyclical market preferences etc. means that a lot of yo-yos will be released that seem redundant if viewed over time.
I mean we could just ask them @YoYoExpertEric @AndreBoulay any thoughts on the use of AI on the yye shop?
The sibyl had some legit backstory info on Dis’ website, but the description on the yye site is slop. I’m sure it’s reasonable to ask the seller to make a short version of the description instead of using ChatGPT to muddle up the details lol. it takes months to design and manufacture and prepare marketing material for a yoyo. I’m sure that writing a snappy description for yoyo vendors isn’t too much extra workload on the seller’s side
Also let’s all remain civil in the end this hobby is hard cause there truely isn’t that much money in it and it is a niche. Lots of effort is put in to make this hobby great and some places it gets less effort. Only so many of us in this trying to make a fun hobby sustainable and keep it all going. Lots of money pits too like this forum and various other efforts that don’t have a big ROI but are kept around it done as an act of love for the hobby.
There is another site selling the Sibyl and the description is no better.
The last time I recall people here panning a product description, it was clear that the offending aspects came from the brand’s own site.
How much of this issue is on brands to provide compelling copy suitable for the venue, rather than expecting retailers to rebuild their story from scratch?
the issue here is that brands ARE providing the descriptions and they are still getting AI summarized
Are you saying that Dis provided a good summary for the Sibyl and YYE overrode their request to post it and went with an AI summary instead?
I still think it’s an issue. IMO most descriptions are worse than they started after ChatGPT gets involved. The few that are improved by ChatGPT are outweighed by the many that aren’t.
And if I’m being honest ChatGPT isn’t really improving anything lol. Makes everything sound the same in a bad way.
yes, there are other examples as well, if you go through yoyo samuel and yoyoexpert and compare descriptions you start to see the pattern of one being AI summarized/generated from the other
see my first post in this thread too for at least 10+ examples of the same AI-generated sentence structure across multiple yoyos/brands, and that took me like 10 minutes to dig up, there’s plenty more in the backlog.
I think it is important to note that the appearance of text on a brand’s website does not indicate that the brand asked retailers to use the same copy, provided any copy at all, reviewed the copy that was used or would be concerned about the comparative quality. Some of these are certainly more plausible suppositions than others.
(I suspect that some brands expect/prefer to carry their own promotional weight and look to retailers to reduce their distribution headaches. I.e. they don’t expect a retailer to generate many sales of their product based purely on the product page.)
Nor can it be assumed that retailers scraping brand websites for copy would be welcome.
So the fact that Brand A has great content and a retailer doesn’t isn’t necessarily an example of the retailer insisting on using a bad summary or artificially generated copy over Brand A’s stated preference.
Similar sentence structure in promotional copy for similar products is not surprising and I am not sure why it would be concerning (other than being unhelpful when consumed at scale or for details that are frequently missing from promotional copy anyway). That is true no matter how it is produced (although LLMs introduce genuine problems).
The only issue I have with the store is the amount of brands not listed on the side bar
i am dumb and do not learn easy
i still go topbar>brands>
looking for empathy every time >.<
I understand your point here, but from my perspective that’s kind of an obvious statement. Like, technically any yoyo can be used for anything. You can do 4a on a 1a yoyo. Does that mean it’s a useful thing to emphasize in a product description? No, because it’s obviously not designed for that, just as a 57 x 53mm 1a yoyo is not designed for tech, it’s designed for meta combos and competition bangers. It would be more useful IMO to focus only on the true strengths.
I get that this is kind of a hard process, however. The play of a yoyo is largely subjective in many aspects when it comes to things like “fast” “floaty” etc., so there’s always some ambiguity. Still, I think it’s worth striving to do better.
To bring up a positive feedback, I think the gold standard of product descriptions that I have seen is Atmos Projects with their design journals. Of the few of their yoyos I’ve gotten to try, each one on the first throw has been like “yep, that’s exactly what I expected based on the description.” It’s very impressive.
I think in particular this case it is believed to be useful due to a high number of potential buyers skeptical that these wider designs are viable at all for anything other than the play that they really cater to. It’s more a matter of selling these still newish designs.
Well, first of all, do we even know for sure that YYE is using AI for its product descriptions?
I think it’s worth it to keep in mind that a lot of people read so much AI writing—seeing as it’s shoved in your face from every possible angle—that a lot of us are beginning to write a little bit like AI. This has, in my experience, made it quite tough to spot true AI writing.
But really, I don’t like reading AI. I’d much rather read something written by a real person. However, if they want to use AI, then whatever. It’s a quick and easy way to write something that a lot of people won’t read or place too much value upon anyway.
An instance where AI should absolutely never be used (in my opinion) is in more creative writing. Things like novels, short stories, etc. Things where the purpose is not just to inform, but rather to make the reader feel something, or think deeply about something. That is where I think you shouldn’t be using any AI.
On another, more frivolous note, I’ve been accused multiple times of using, or even being AI, on account of my using Em Dashes… what’s that about? do ‘normal’ people not use them? oi, oi, oi…
yes,
