Who needs a sneaker bot when AI can hallucinate a win for you?
Every February we see a big spike in retailers running sneaker launches on EQL to coincide with the 2025 NBA All-Star Weekend. This year, the festivities kicked off a little earlier than normal, courtesy of Jordan Brand, who have been getting serious about getting back their mojo and dropping some serious heat in the process. This year marks 40 years since a talented rookie by the name of Michael Jordan wore his signature shoes at the 1985 All-Star Dunk Contest in a colorway that is now firmly ingrained in sneaker culture lore. To mark the occasion, Jordan Brand recreated the shoe in what they say is the closest to OG spec ever. Sneakerheads have been anticipating the drop for months and the demand was predictably crazy.
At first, everything appeared to be going smoothly. Thousands of entries were rolling in, bots were being neutralized, winners were being picked and notified, but as we started notifying non-winners that they’d missed out, things got weird.
We started seeing reports of people being told that they had won and lost in the same email… the Schrödinger’s cat of bug reports. What on earth was going on??
Now, we’re accustomed to a baseline level of crazy – it comes with the territory of running some of the hottest product launches on the internet. Having a 24/7 support team who can bring calm to the chaos is big reason why brands work with EQL. But even for us, this one felt odd.
Fans were reporting that their email app was listing ”You’ve been selected” but when they clicked on the email it displayed the heartbreaking “SORRY” non-winner message. Sneaker fans are a passionate bunch, and online launches often trigger the full range of human emotions - to put it mildly! People were understandably mad about the confusing messaging.
When things heat up, it’s helpful to have a community you can turn to. We operate in a space where people sometimes troll for fun – or profit, like the time someone tried to pretend they’d won 750 pairs of the Nike/Tiffany Air Force 1 1837 to pump a cookgroup.
We reached out to our Discord community, who confirmed that the issue was real and shared some more screenshots:
The bizarre thing is that our winner emails don’t actually say “You’ve been selected”. As an on-call engineer, this is the point when you start questioning your life choices. You know that the issue is affecting thousands of users, but the offending phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in EQL’s codebase, aside from some very old launches several years ago.
As more screenshots poured in, another odd thing jumped out – the winning phrase seemed to change from email to email. Some said “selected to purchase JORDAN AJ1”, others said “selected for the JORDAN AJ1”:
By this point, we’d narrowed down the affected users to a single email client - Yahoo Mail, which is where we got suspicious. Had Yahoo Mail introduced any features lately that might be causing this…?
As it turns out, yes, yes they had. A quick Google search revealed that a few months ago Yahoo jumped on the AI craze with the launch of ”AI-generated, one-line email summaries”.
At this point, the penny dropped. Just like Apple AI generating fake news summaries, Yahoo AI was hallucinating the fake winner messages, presumably as a result of training their model on our old emails. Worse, they were putting an untrustworthy AI summary in the exact place that users expect to see an email subject, with no mention of it being AI-generated 🤯
Some people use Yahoo Mail to read emails from other providers like Gmail, so this issue hit a broad range of sneaker fans. And it’s worth mentioning that as of the time of writing, this AI feature is still live in Yahoo Mail, so more confusion is expected in future – not just for sneaker fans receiving launch results, but for anyone reading important emails in Yahoo Mail.
For EQL users, if you’re ever in doubt, you can always double-check your launch results in the fans app, contact our support team (support@eql.com) or join our helpful Discord community. Until then, we’ll continue fighting the good fight to put products into the hands of real fans and trying to prevent bad AI from ruining your day! 🤖
