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Well, this person claims on their website to have a PhD in math from CMU and to have taught the topic at multiple state universities. You could dig some into whether that's true, and then rely on the reputation of the named institutions if you don't know anything about them.

Just like reputation already worked. People have associations with each other. People endorse each other. Endorsements carry some transitive weight (I suppose you could use graph theory to model this). This has nothing to do with AI. Yes, Amazon is full of constantly changing "brands" with no reputation. That is different from a person or company that does have a consistent reputation that you can look up, even if you hadn't heard of them until today. Even Amazon also has e.g. Samsung or Asus if you don't want to buy AHIKJASFDIUHER.

by BHSPitMonkey7 seconds ago|

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The difference in the post-LLM era is that false identities can stand up a cohesive background and online presence with extremely little effort or human input, as many times as desired.

You took a cursory glance at a CV on a website and decided that was probably good enough to keep suspicion at bay, this time. But digging more and more to build up trust requires more time and effort than a bad actor trying to advance an agenda would need to put in; It is asymmetric.

by thaumasiotes4 hours ago|

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> For at least the past 5 years, Amazon.com has been completely flooded with throwaway brand names churned out from random sequences of characters selling white-labelled products.

The last time I looked into someone's complaint on HN about Chinese companies setting themselves up on Amazon with nonsense data and no way to contact them nor any theoretical method of holding them to account for misbehavior, I went to the product link the complaining comment provided and discovered that it was offered by a company whose registered place of business (listed on Amazon!) was obviously the poor owner's personal home address.