Fakes
The economics of fakes have flipped.
Cloning a shop used to cost a designer a week. Today it costs a prompt. The output is cleaner, faster and looks more real than ever.
Zero marginal cost
One prompt. A thousand stores.
Generative AI removed the only friction that ever slowed fakes down: effort. A scam operator now spins up complete brand worlds — site, copy, product photography, reviews, support persona — in an afternoon.
The math is brutal. If a single working scam pays for a thousand attempts, attackers run a thousand attempts. And then ten thousand.
Industrial quality
They don't look like fakes anymore.
Typos, broken layouts, off-brand colour — the tells we taught people to spot are gone. Modern fakes are pixel-perfect, locale-aware and conversion-optimised.
The visual surface of the web is no longer evidence of anything. That's the layer #trstd replaces.