>I sort of trust them to make product recommendations

Never, ever.

Your argument is "they're designed to influence us" right?

Amazon reviews are paid influence. Reddit posts are paid influence. Everything everywhere you read online is paid influence. I'd rank LLMs between "people I personally trust" and "random people online."

Since LLMs are trained on "random people online", why are they not of equal rank?

For me, for now, they are. And being "many random people" and not "random person", they average out into something much more trustworthy than even recommendations from most individuals I know personally.

Operative word is "for now" - LLMs caught entrepreneurs unprepared, but they'll catch up and poison this too, same thing that happened with search giving rise to SEO.

I see LLM as the average of multiple random people and traditional common sense from wikipedia and books.

It's worth keeping in mind that some of those random people are trolls.

In fairness to your point, I also find that Amazon reviews can no longer be trusted, and I really try to buy as little as possible from Amazon. Due to this, and other reasons, I find it quite difficult to have a good sense for whether I've bought something high quality, or if it'll be a piece of trash.

Drifting off topic now, but Amazon could easily implement a few measures to really lock down reviews, but they purposely leave it gameable because it drives sales.

I trust them as much as any other online source, which is to say, sort of, but only as a starting point for research.

Do you have a better alternative?

It depends. For home improvement projects, you can see what tools people are using. If a home repair channel is trustworthy, that may be a good start. General market research can help as well. For instance, post-China-buyout Craftsman should be avoided. For nearly anything else, it really depends. Name-brand electronics are usually safe unless they're small items (eg, power adapters, USB cords. Batteries are nearly impossible to purchase online without getting ripped off.) For clothing, I would just generally recommend only buying from thrift stores. For a lot of physical items (eg: door knobs, fuel hoses, etc.) it is actually quite difficult to purchase online. In person, we can tell a lot about quality just by touching the object with your hands. (eg: a flimsy shelf is not self-evident online, but is obvious in the hardware store.)

I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying that nearly every category of item requires its own strategy. For a brief period consumers were winning the information war and you could just go to Amazon, read the reviews, and get a superior product for cheap. We're now in a modern-but-old-fashioned situation. It's quite difficult to know if you're going to get ripped off, and you're forced to rely on more blunt heuristics. (eg: trust specific brands, buy things in person, etc.) None of these are perfect, but they are quickly becoming the best of some bad options.

Even if they're (somehow) bias-free, you're still stuck with "the state of the internet circa 20XX" from the training data.

> my wallet

Does it actually need direct access to your wallet? I haven't tried it yet, but assumed it would work with a separate wallet, fed through by top-ups.

Sounds like they are an intermediary between the user and the business. So it’s not a top-up thing. That would be needlessly complex from ChatGPT’s end, too.

https://chatgpt.com/merchants/