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Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Vinted pro reveals 'sneaky' trick to help flog clothes you're struggling to sell
A professional Vinted seller has revealed the one nifty trick she uses to help flog hard-to-shift items on the app. Caroline, who hails from the UK, boasts 213,000 followers on TikTok where she regularly shares her top tips for aspiring vendors. The 49-year-old, who has made thousands on the app, introduced the video by describing the 'genius hack' she uses to cash in on unsold items. She explained at the beginning of the clip - which now has 15,000 views - that she had already sold three pieces that day and was preparing to send them. But before making her way to the Post Office, she will periodically scan the app to see if any of her listings have been favourited. Then she will contact interested buyers to see if she can entice them into making a purchase, telling them she can post items imminently if they buy. 'I will write a message saying, "I will be doing a parcel run this afternoon. If you are still interested in this item, I can post this out to you today so you'll get it super quick",' she explained. 'Then, I'll copy and paste that same message to everyone else who has favourited items yet to be sold.' The nifty trick helps her nudge transactions which would have otherwise gone unsold, Caroline claimed, adding that it was 'highly likely' that at least one person would bite. In previous videos, the thrifty seller said she once made £400 on the app in just one day. Several commenters agreed with the advice. 'I've done exactly this for about a month now,' one said. A second chimed: 'Great idea! Sneaky, but great! Others remarked that they also used the trick, with one gushing that they had sold five items doing so. Meanwhile, not everyone agreed, with one saying that they developed the 'ick' after sellers contacted them about a favourited item. Another admitted that they couldn't 'think of anything worse'. Caroline isn't the only successful secondhand seller to have cashed in on the Vinted train. Maisie, from Yorkshire, has amassed thousands of pounds selling garments and trinkets she's discovered at cat boot sales, charity shops and online pre-loved websites. Although it started off as a side hustle, she has now made reselling her full time career last year after earning £18,000 from flogging clothes. Now, she has helped others by telling them how they too can make a wage from the app - and according to her, it's very simple. Maisie said: 'I absolutely love buying on Vinted to resell on Vinted. It's so easy and it just goes to show the difference that a good quality picture with good lighting and a good background can honestly make.' She says that you should always list similar clothes sizes at the same time on Vinted, as people may browse your page and find other items that they like, resulting in more sales. Several commenters agreed with the advice 'They're more likely to get their money's worth by buying a bundle from you so it will boost your sales and your profit at the same time,' Maisie added. 'You're only having to ship out one parcel and the buyer is only having to pay one lot of postage and fees.' The seller said wannabe sellers also have to be careful about how they draft listings on Vinted - as sometimes a post can appear as though it was shared earlier than it was. In another clip, the reselling expert explained: 'If you draft something and then a week later you decide to hit live and publish it, it won't show as a new listing. It will show when you drafted it, which was a week ago. 'It will come up older in the listings, it won't show up at the top, it will show up as being a week old which will affect how people are looking at your listings because a lot of people will search for newest first.' Recently, Maisie revealed how she sold a dress for more than four times what she paid for it. She purchased a WoolOvers boho linen dress for just £3.30 on Vinted as part of a bundle from a seller. Maisie then ended up reselling it on eBay for a whopping £20.46.
Engadget
33 minutes ago
- Engadget
Foreign propagandists continue using ChatGPT in influence campaigns
Chinese propaganda and social engineering operations have been using ChatGPT to create posts, comments and drive engagement at home and abroad. OpenAI said it has recently disrupted four Chinese covert influence operations that were using its tool to generate social media posts and replies on platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Reddit and X. The comments generated revolved around several topics from US politics to a Taiwanese video game where players fight the Chinese Communist Party. ChatGPT was used to create social media posts that both supported and decried different hot button issues to stir up misleading political discourse. Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI told NPR , "what we're seeing from China is a growing range of covert operations using a growing range of tactics." While OpenAI claimed it also disrupted a handful of operations it believes originated in Russia, Iran and North Korea, Nimmo elaborated on the Chinese operations saying they "targeted many different countries and topics [...] some of them combined elements of influence operations, social engineering, surveillance." This is far from the first time this has occurred. In 2023, researchers from cybersecurity firm Mandiant found that AI-generated content has been used in politically motivated online influence campaigns in numerous instances since 2019. In 2024, OpenAI published a blog post outlining its efforts to disrupt five state-affiliated operations across China, Iran and North Korea that were using OpenAI models for malicious intent. These applications included debugging code, generating scripts and creating content for use in phishing campaigns. That same year, OpenAI said it disrupted an Iranian operation that was using ChatGPT to create longform political articles about US elections that were then posted on fake news sites posing as both conservative and progressive outlets. The operation was also creating comments to post on X and Instagram through fake accounts, again espousing opposing points of view. "We didn't generally see these operations getting more engagement because of their use of AI," Nimmo told NPR . "For these operations, better tools don't necessarily mean better outcomes." This offers little comfort. As generative AI gets cheaper and smarter , it stands to reason that its ability to generate content en masse will make influence campaigns like these easier and more affordable to build, even if their efficacy remains unchanged.
Fast Company
43 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Enjoy ‘AI slop' summer. What's coming next is worse
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company 's weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. 'AI Slop' summer is here AI image and video generation tools have gone mainstream, with millions creating content and using them on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Social networks such as Facebook and Pinterest are also seeing a surge in AI-generated posts. Meta is actively promoting this trend, as AI content is easy to produce and often drives higher engagement, creating more opportunities to sell ads. Much of the AI-generated content is what critics call 'AI slop'—low-quality material often produced by low-wage workers in developing countries aiming to harvest clicks on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. This content frequently spreads further via messaging apps like WhatsApp and is often political in nature. One growing genre features right-wing fantasy videos portraying acts of revenge or defiance by MAGA figures such as Donald Trump or Pam Bondi. These are typically just still images with overlaid text—clearly fictional. (Left-leaning versions exist too, though they more often rely on real footage, such as Jamie Raskin or Jasmine Crockett dismantling Republican talking points in Congress.) AI-generated content is also increasingly surfacing in search results, often pushing aside higher-quality human-created material. E-commerce platforms like Amazon are flooded with AI-generated product descriptions, user reviews, and even entire books. Some news organizations have started publishing AI-written articles, especially in sports and news roundups—many riddled with inaccuracies. Recently, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer unintentionally ran book list inserts featuring AI-generated descriptions of books that don't actually exist. Right now, much of the AI-generated content online can still be distinguished from genuinely human-made material. Take, for example, a viral AI video from April that depicted overweight U.S. factory workers (a satire of Trump's tariff policies). It looked fairly realistic but still gave off that unmistakable 'generated' vibe. Still, the line is blurring fast. Consider the recent viral clip of an Australian woman trying to pass airport security with her ' service kangaroo.' It racked up over a million likes before it was revealed to be AI-generated. Some viewers saw through it—many did not. The video proved that with a semi-plausible premise and decent AI tools, the boundary between real and fake can dissolve entirely. It's not hard to see where this is going. Google's new Veo 3 video generation tool is a case in point: The sample videos are alarmingly realistic. Time recently showed how these tools can create convincing deepfakes of political riots and election fraud. AI-generated content has been advancing for years, but we may have arrived at a moment where even video—once the hardest medium to fake—can no longer be trusted. With more powerful tools and social platforms eager to boost engagement, we're likely heading toward a web saturated with AI-generated content. And when anything can be fake, everything becomes suspect. Are we ready for the 'zero-trust' internet? Reddit sues Anthropic over AI training data The social platform Reddit says the AI company Anthropic has used content created by Reddit users to train AI models in ways that violate its policies. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in a San Francisco court, Reddit accused Anthropic of using users' posts without permission, causing harm to the platform. AI companies rely heavily on information stores like Reddit to train the large language models that power popular chatbots such as ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Reddit is seen as a particularly valuable resource because it holds millions of human-to-human conversations across thousands of topics, spanning the past two decades. The conversations are not only valuable for their content, but for how authentically they reflect the way people write and speak. No wonder Reddit cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman calls it 'the most human place on the internet.' And content licensing for AI training is a big and growing business for the platform. Reddit's shares on the New York Stock Exchange finished the day up more than 7% after news of the lawsuit broke Wednesday. The company has already formed content licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI (Sam Altman is a major shareholder in Reddit). It's possible that the lawsuit was filed after Reddit and Anthropic failed to come to terms on a content licensing agreement. Reddit certainly isn't the first content company to sue a well-funded AI lab for alleged misuse of data. OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, and others have all been the target of legal actions related to training data. Many of these cases center on the question of whether or not data that's publicly available on the internet falls under the 'fair use' safe harbor of the Copyright Act, rendering it fair game for AI training. Trump's foreign student ban: a master class in the art of the self-own Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that the U.S. will begin revoking visas for visiting Chinese students, including those in 'critical fields,' and will tighten visa requirements for future applicants. The Trump administration repeatedly claims it wants America to win the global AI race, while being openly hostile to the very brains that could help the U.S. achieve that goal. Research from the National Foundation for American Policy shows that two-thirds (66%) of U.S.-based AI startups have immigrant cofounders, and 55% of billion-dollar startups were founded or cofounded by immigrants. Meanwhile, other countries are rolling out the red carpet. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology offered guaranteed admission to any Harvard international student. Germany and Ireland are courting current and prospective Harvard students. China, too. As AI impacts talent needs, foreign students will be needed to fill demand. Because AI coding assistants are significantly increasing the productivity of individual engineers, big tech companies are investing less in entry-level programmers (and more in GPUs and data centers). CEO Satya Nadella says 20% to 30% of Microsoft code is now AI-generated, and that he expects that rate to grow to 95% by 2030. Tech companies will likely need people with PhDs or other graduate-level degrees to fill more specialized roles such as those responsible for training and steering AI models. And that talent pool isn't big enough. International graduate students with advanced technical skills are more valuable than ever. The Administration is signaling a retreat from the global competition for AI talent.
