Well, if we're going to have the conversation: so what if it were AI? Shouldn't the question be around correctness and good pedagogy? Shouldn't the question always be about vouching for those things? If it's actually done well (e.g. they were able to generate better illustrations than they otherwise could've), why exactly should someone think twice?
The author put his name and reputation to it. If it's excellent work, it's excellent work. If it's slop, it's slop.
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 ones that do poorly get discarded and replaced, and the ones that find traction get to climb the rankings.
Do you think the same doesn't apply to "authors" of books, social media posts, and even academic papers in 2026? It doesn't matter if someone's staked their reputation unless their reputation is already widely known and trusted to begin with.
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.
> 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.
That doesn't really answer anything though. There are tons of human cranks out there too who are perfectly willing to spend tons of time on their "theories." Humans make errors too. If you don't have a way to evaluate the source material or some endorsement from someone you have a reason to trust, then AI doesn't change that. If you do have an endorsement (e.g. Terence Tao says some AI book is extremely well done, or puts out his own book that he openly used AI to write), then why would you discard it because AI?
I'm not the OP, but I can give my answer to this question, or at least one of my answers.
This book is presented as being written by a human. (In this case, a human I happen to know, which would add another dimension to my complaint, so let's imagine that weren't the case.) Maybe someday we'll live in a world where sticking a person's name at the top of a book doesn't carry the implication that they wrote the words in the book. That would make me sad for other reasons, but in any event, we don't live in that world right now, so for now, if you put a person's name on your book, you are claiming that that person wrote the book. If that's not true, you are lying, and like most people, I don't like being lied to.
Why does putting your name on it have to imply you wrote every word, and not instead, just attach your reputation to it, and say that you stand behind the words that are in it, regardless of who/what wrote the words? If we look at things that way, we can continue as we always have evaluating the content, pedagogy, etc. and associate good and bad content, pedagogy, etc with the author and know that when we see that author's name we'll know what we should expect (regardless of who wrote the individual words).
I'm imagining something more like the way we treat movie directors. When I see Michael Bay vs. Quentin Tarantino, I don't think that those people wrote the film, or set up every camera shot in minute detail, or designed the costumes, etc. but I know that they had a hand in arranging for all of that and it will all ultimately come through with their unique stamp on it.
You're proposing a new way that we could treat authorship that's different from how we currently treat authorship. There's an argument to be had about whether that would be better than our current system. My vote would be no, but I'm not claiming it's obvious one way or the other.
But regardless of whether you think your new system would be better, it's not the current system. Surely the question of whether someone is lying by putting their name on a book they didn't write can't depend on some hypothetical future change to the meaning of authorship that hasn't happened yet.
What do you mean "the" or "our" current system? That's entirely your interpretation, and we've always had a sliding scale of "non-authorship" from editors to ghostwriters. AI models are the same; you can use them in a heavily directed way (basically, as an editor, or in an outsourcing capacity for e.g. illustrations), or in a hands off way that you just endorse.
> Maybe someday we'll live in a world where sticking a person's name at the top of a book doesn't carry the implication that they wrote the words in the book.
Not even an AI thing, we don't. Ghost writing has been going on for centuries.
I don't like that! I agree it's dishonest and I wish we lived in a world where having been exposed employing a ghostwriter is a disgrace no public figure can come back from. I don't like that AI has made it worse, either. At least with ghost writing there are some contexts (politicians, celebrity bios) where you might suspect it, but in most you won't.
Yeah, I'm also not a big fan of ghostwriting in the domains where it's prevalent. For what it's worth, though, academic writing is very much not one of those domains: taking LLM's out of it, if ten years ago it had turned out that the "author" of a math textbook like this one had paid someone else to write the whole book for them, that would be considered major academic misconduct and that person's reputation would have been pretty severely damaged. I do think it makes sense to take the norms of a particular subset of the publishing world into account when thinking about what a reasonable reader expects when they see someone's name on a book.
Human expertise and appeal to authority have long been a proxy for correctness and soundness in a body of work.
It's not a perfect proxy, but I'm usually going to trust a domain expert over the confident idiot who constantly lies to me, hides and downplays mistakes, and flits around opposing positions like a drunken moth.
At this time, if I see a text is AI generated, I have to assume it is unsound and possibly even nefarious. There is way too much information assailing my daily life that I have no other rational choice.
The author put his name and reputation to it. If it's excellent work, it's excellent work. If it's slop, it's slop.