A small business owner specializing in custom T-shirts has discovered what appears to be a large-scale replication of his designs on a major online marketplace, raising concerns about potential AI-assisted scraping of his entire website. After operating for over a decade, the founder first noticed identical products for sale and later uncovered thousands of knockoffs spanning multiple years. The discovery has left him grappling with the impact of unauthorized copying on his long-standing enterprise. Investigations suggest the issue may stem from automated data extraction, though the full extent of the operation remains under review.
Warwick Levy, who runs Lonely Kids Club, says AI may have been used to scrape his entire website and replicate designsGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAfter 15 years running a small business making T-shirts, Warwick Levy says it was “brutal” when he first discovered an identical design for sale on Temu.It turned out there was an overwhelming amount of T-shirts identical to his own for sale on the Chinese e-commerce marketplace. Between 2025 and earlier this year, Levy, 37, found thousands of rip-offs. Continue reading...
