Etsy Can Train AI on Your Listings Starting December 16: What Jewelry Sellers Should Know

Short answer: Etsy’s updated Terms of Use, effective December 16, 2026, let Etsy and its “third party partners and vendors” use sellers’ listing photos, descriptions, reviews, and videos to train artificial intelligence. Sellers keep ownership, but the license Etsy gets is perpetual and irrevocable, and we couldn’t find a clear way for US sellers to opt out while they keep selling on Etsy.

If you make jewelry, those photos took real work. You built the lighting setup, shot the same pair of earrings forty times to catch the stone in the right light, and wrote descriptions that sound like you. So it makes sense that a lot of sellers stopped scrolling when this sentence started going around. We read the new terms ourselves (Etsy published them on October 26), and below is what they say, what’s still unclear, and what you can do. We run StillSparkly, a jewelry marketplace, so we obviously have a stake in where you sell. We’ve quoted Etsy directly and marked the parts that are our own reading.

What do Etsy’s new terms say about AI training?

Etsy’s new terms add AI training to the license sellers already give Etsy over their content. Section 5 of the Terms of Use has always given Etsy a broad license to your content so it can show your listings, resize photos, translate descriptions, and advertise. The new version adds this line: the license “also includes the right for us and our third party partners and vendors to use Your Content to develop, train, test and improve artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, including to improve the Services and/or help keep them safe, subject to any applicable opt-out rights described in our Privacy Policy.”

“Your Content” is defined in the same section, and it includes shop names, profile pictures, listing photos, listing descriptions, reviews, comments, videos, and usernames. The license itself is described as non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, sub-licensable, and perpetual.

Etsy told Value Added Resource that the goal is to improve the AI that powers its own marketplace, with examples like tools for sellers, showing buyers more relevant items, and fraud detection. That may well be the plan today, but the terms you agree to are written much more broadly than those examples.

Who gets to use your photos and descriptions?

Etsy itself, plus the “third party partners and vendors” it chooses. The terms don’t name those partners, and they don’t say whether a partner could use what it learns from your listings in products that have nothing to do with Etsy. When Value Added Resource asked, Etsy’s answer didn’t settle that question either.

At the same time, Etsy’s terms now forbid everyone else from doing the same thing. Section 6 says no one may use content from Etsy, “whether by automated or manual means,” to develop, train, fine-tune, evaluate, or benchmark AI without Etsy’s express permission. So the photos of your work are off-limits to outside AI companies unless Etsy says yes, and available to Etsy and the companies it works with.

Can Etsy sellers opt out of AI training?

We couldn’t find a way. The AI sentence points to “any applicable opt-out rights described in our Privacy Policy,” so we went looking. Etsy’s updated global Privacy Policy has a general right to object when Etsy processes your personal information based on its “legitimate interests,” and it applies “in certain circumstances.” That right is about personal information. Whether it reaches a photo of a ring or the description you wrote for it is an open question, and we didn’t see a setting or form built for keeping listings out of AI training. Sellers in the EU and UK may have stronger rights under their privacy laws than sellers in the US.

If this matters to you, the most useful thing you can do is ask Etsy support in writing which opt-out the terms mean and how a seller in your country would use it, and keep a copy of whatever they tell you.

Does closing your Etsy shop take your photos back?

Not fully. Because the license is perpetual and irrevocable, it doesn’t end when you leave, and Section 7 of the terms says that closing your account “will not affect the availability of some of Your Content” you posted before. The new terms take effect December 16, and Etsy’s terms say that using Etsy after that date counts as accepting them. The only alternative Etsy offers to agreeing is closing your account.

Anything you list on Etsy after December 16 falls under the new wording from the moment it goes up.

Why does this matter more for jewelry sellers?

A plain white T-shirt photo doesn’t teach an image model much it didn’t already know, but a handmade piece of jewelry is a design (the way you wrap wire around a stone, your bezel style, the texture you hammer into silver), and the photos and descriptions you post are a detailed record of it. Jewelry is also one of the categories people already try to copy and dropship, so plenty of makers have reasons to be careful about where their best photos end up.

Vintage and pre-owned sellers have a different stake, which is the hours of research that go into a good listing: researching a maker’s mark, dating a clasp, writing up the condition piece by piece. That research is exactly the kind of text that makes a marketplace’s search and pricing tools smarter, and under these terms you’re handing it over with no end date.

What can you do before December 16?

Start by saving your originals. Keep the full-size photos and the description text for every listing somewhere you control, so your catalog doesn’t live only on Etsy. Then ask Etsy in writing about the opt-out, as above, so you know where you stand.

After that, think about which pieces go where. You don’t have to close your Etsy shop to have a say. You can keep it running and list your newest or most distinctive work somewhere else. If you sell handmade, vintage, or pre-owned jewelry, that’s the kind of seller StillSparkly was built for.

How StillSparkly handles your listings

StillSparkly is a marketplace only for jewelry, and we don’t train AI on your listings. Our Terms of Service don’t include a right to do it, either. You keep ownership of your photos and descriptions, and the license you give us covers hosting and displaying them, resizing, cropping and cleaning up your photos, and promoting your listings on StillSparkly and on places like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. It lasts as long as your content is on StillSparkly, plus a reasonable time to clear it out of our systems and backups. Delete a listing and we remove its photos from our storage.

We do use outside tools to help write your listing, and we’d rather tell you exactly how. When you use our listing tools, your photos are sent to Google to be processed so we can write a first draft of your listing and suggest a price. Nothing posts until you’ve read it and hit publish. Our Privacy Policy spells this out.

It costs nothing to list on StillSparkly. Our fee is 8% of the sale, and only when something sells. Makers can add a Handmade badge to their work. For a side-by-side on fees and everything else, see Etsy vs StillSparkly for jewelry, and if you’re also sorting out Etsy’s October photo rules, we wrote up Etsy’s new AI image policy too. If you’d like to try it, see how selling on StillSparkly works.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Etsy: Terms of Use (effective December 16, 2026)
• Etsy: Privacy Policy (effective December 16, 2026)
• Value Added Resource: Etsy Expands AI Training Rights Over Seller Content