Etsy Bans AI-Generated Recipes and Patterns, Requires 1 Real Product Photo

3 articles · Updated · CNBC · Oct 22

Etsy said it will stop merchants from selling AI-generated “functional guides” — including recipes, sewing patterns and crochet instructions — as digital downloads on its marketplace.
Sellers must now show an actual item made from those instructions and include at least one unedited photo, while bot-generated listings with no human involvement are also barred.
Etsy said the tighter rules respond to a trust problem: buyers increasingly cannot tell which items use AI, making that confusion a top-three barrier to shopping more often on the site.
AI-generated art will still be allowed if sellers play a clear creative role, disclose AI use and do not present the work as handmade or entirely their own.
The move fits Etsy’s broader effort to defend its handmade identity against mass-produced goods and misleading AI content, even as it expands AI tools for search, shopper profiling and OpenAI-powered discovery.