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Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

You can't just make up an identity, claim you have a PhD from a well-known university, and appear on someone else's (e.g. the university's) website. I asked ChatGPT:

> The author of https://vertex.degree/ claims to have a phd and taught courses. Can you find evidence from the named institutions?

And it gave me links to .edu sites corroborating the claims (e.g. he's on a registry of PhDs[0]). I asked if the institutions link to this site, and it said his personal site links to this site[1], and that CMU links to his personal site[2]. If anything it's far easier to check this stuff now. Took me 30 seconds.

[0] https://www.cmu.edu/math/grad/phd/past-recipients.html

[1] https://misha.fish/

[2] https://www.math.cmu.edu/users/math/mlavrov/

Sure, posting under a well-known research institutions own domain is a strong link in the trust chain in this example.

Of course you have to be able to trust that some post you find (which names a real person doing work in the field) really comes from that person and is not simply stealing their authority.

My point wasn't that this specific case is like that, but rather that online spaces are bombarded with claims that take far less effort to generate than it takes to verify or debunk. And once some story is seen by enough eyeballs, no withdrawal or retraction is going to have the same reach (bad actors already know this).

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