I think you're proving his point: You've identified that the fraudulent items make it hard to trust the marketplace, and (reading between the lines) that has affected your habits in relation to the marketplace.

I often trust AliEx more than Amazon these days. At least one of the two isn't pretending not to be what it is.

Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.

I'd say that's hard to judge from the top line sales numbers, their broad sales could remain fine even when they lose larger rare purchases if they're bringing in enough new customers that are fine with only buying the slop.

Sales may not have declined, but returns have skyrocketed. I return at least as much stuff as I keep. Sometimes they tell me to just keep the crap because they know it's crap and it costs them more for me to return it than to just refund me and let me keep the crap thing.

Does it really impact people that much though?

There are two categories of (physical) products I buy on Amazon.

Regular “brand name” items sold in pretty much any big box retail store. I have more or less the same experience with Amazon as I do Walmart or Target or wherever for that category. Over thousands of orders I’ve never received a fake or had an issue outside of very rare packaging issues like damaged boxes.

The other category is “trash I need faster than aliexpress” and it’s basically exactly as-advertised for that junk. I usually get the item in two days or less where I am, and the quality level is more or less the same as ordering direct from China. Just trading expense for quicker latency. Useful for that last component for a project or whatnot.

I get that I might not be normal though. If I went to Amazon and searched for “grow lights” and got presented with what you get via that search I’d be quite frustrated. But I tend to research exactly what I want for those product categories and never had a problem getting what I expected.

Also interested by the answer!

All the playlists that Spotify generates for me are made of songs from actual humans and matches my taste.

The only times I'm exposed to slop is when I listen to generic playlists from Spotify or dodgy sources.

There are a couple sound-quality based tells that I've noticed, off the top of my head

1. Usually weird little "flickers" of sound - like how a candle gives you mostly constant light but there are little flashes of bright and dark. AI generated music tends to have little distortions scattered throughout like that. As the models have improved they're less obvious but still absolutely there if you try to listen to any individual 'instrument' or 'track'

2. very low dynamic range - loud sounds and quiet sounds are much more similar volume than you'd expect from most real music, and things that are supposed to fade or taper-off in volume are unnatural

Hi-hats. When testing sound quality, pay attention to the hi-hats. Once you notice the shimmer introduced by audio compression to a hi-hat you can't unhear it, and for whatever reason AI generated music replicates this.