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.
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.