Hate-Reading Wirecutter in the Nascent Era of AI Slop

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This aggressively hideous $200 coat rack has been living rent-free in my head for years, ever since the moment I saw it in a Wirecutter roundup of doorway-decluttering products. I’m in a forever fight with my narrow entryway, and here was Wirecutter landing in my inbox and promising a selection of “simultaneously beautiful and functional” solutions. Now, is this coat rack functional? I am willing to take Wirecutter’s word for it, and at an eye-popping price, I certainly hope it performs. But beautiful? I mean, “eye of the beholder” and all that, but this coat rack looks like an errant part that might have fallen off of or out of an airplane–possibly both.

Still, you can’t please everyone all the time, particularly when it comes to something as subjective as the aesthetics of personal style and home decor. I think the Eames Hang-It-All, also recommended, looks less whimsical and more like “it smells like half-regurgitated animal crackers and diaper cream,” which puts me at odds with probably the world’s entire population of fancy design experts. Are they wrong? Am I? Nobody knows! That’s art, baby.

Regardless, $300 is objectively a wild amount of money to spend on any wall-mounted coat hanger, let alone one that looks like it belongs in a high-end Chuck E. Cheese. But as if the Eames itself wasn’t bad enough, Wirecutter recommends not one but two more kindergarten-chic Hang-It-All knockoffs, both at comical price points ($70-$100, which… can people really not throw their coats over a chair or something?). A full third of Wirecutter’s coat storage solutions involve sticking balls on sticks, then sticking the balls on sticks on the wall! It’s a real commitment to the bit. But perhaps beauty is especially in the eye of the beholder when it comes to coat racks; maybe I’m just the kind of person who simply can’t visualize a truly beautiful coat rack. Fine! But sometimes words do mean things, and I refuse to accept that this practically invisible $125 Amazon coat rack falls anywhere in the same universe as “quirky,” but that’s the description Wirecutter chose.

By this time you are likely wondering if this whole piece is going to be one lady hollering about the preferred coat racks of a recommendations website owned by the New York Times, one of America’s most prominent bigotry laundering operations and purveyors of fascism apologia. I promise it will not. I will also be complaining about other bad Wirecutter recommendations, such as these chintzy sunglasses, this list of “wedding guest” dresses that includes one that could legitimately pass for a bridal gown, and a printer I spent five precious and fleeting years of my life in open and active dispute with. I assure you I didn’t write this whole thing just because Wirecutter has become one of my favorite hate-reads after years of getting burned by their bad buys.

If I was just a hate-reader, we wouldn’t be here. I love disliking stuff, and sometimes I simply take a dislike to perfectly inoffensive shit for no reason at all, as a treat or just to keep my hating skills sharp. I’m rarely happier than when I’m getting my gears ground by some inconsequential nonsense. Complaining is one of my life’s great joys, and I strive to excel at it.

There really is something beyond annoyance going on. What irony, that the official publication of “but her emails” is, years and years later, also trying to convince me that this Little House on the Prairie cosplay nightgown could possibly be both “a little transparent” and a “wear-everywhere” garment. I’m not saying I’m being personally gaslit by a newsletter literally nobody is forcing me to read, but it is disconcerting, in an existential way, for a sleep mask recommended for its “durability” to fall apart before I fall asleep.

I love disliking stuff, and sometimes I simply take a dislike to perfectly inoffensive shit for no reason at all, as a treat or just to keep my hating skills sharp.

The recommendations content field is a robust and growing one. There are the traditional players—such as New York magazine’s Strategist vertical, whose recommendations are a lot like Wirecutter’s—and user-generated content sites like Pinterest, Reddit, and Goodreads, the Amazon-fueled cesspool of book ratings controversies, along with book-recs alternative StoryGraph, which boasts that its “machine learning AI is like your trusted go-to friend for book recommendations.” (Wooooof, lolsob, guh.) There’s the grifty-vibes influencers, creating pay-for-play content without disclosure, while others are open about taking cash and freebies for puffed-up recs. There’s always been sketchy advertorial, but the lines are getting blurrier in the age of social media, affiliate marketing, and sponsored links. (It’s worth noting here that The Flytrap itself is a Bookshop.org affiliate.) And then of course there’s the seemingly exponential expansion of so-called “AI” summaries, which can function as a kind of recommendations-machine-inside-the-machine that exists to make recommendations about recommendations.

Already, life feels more like a choose-your-own-reality game every day. The concept of “fake news,” which dominated the early Trump years, is positively antiquated at this point, amid increasingly sophisticated deepfakes and the outright embrace of “AI” content in the mainstream and legacy news spheres. And it’s not just about what’s real or not; it’s about whether we as a ~ society ~ will continue to agree that reality matters. Whenever I hear someone hyping up their AI assistant or bragging about the great cover letter ChatGPT plagiarized up for them, I wonder if I’m the only person left who thinks people should still do some stuff on their own, or pay other people to do stuff, instead of just yeeting their last remaining brain cells into Sam Altman’s bank account while the world literally burns.

There’s always been sketchy advertorial, but the lines are getting blurrier in the age of social media, affiliate marketing, and sponsored links.

I’ve worked on enough “best of” issues at alt-weeklies and glossy magazines to know that sometimes “best of” means “last thing I tried that didn’t completely suck, and I’m on a tight copy deadline.” Some flarf-and-filler content is inevitable, but there’s just so much AI slop out there that looks indistinguishable from the real deal. In light of all this, I’d almost rather get a bad recommendation from a real person than a good recommendation from a bot (which, let’s be real, probably explains my hate-read dedication to Wirecutter). Is that so much to ask? To expect that it’s really possible to go looking for a “simultaneously beautiful and functional” coat rack, and find it … because someone else found it first? That’s what Wirecutter promises, but in a media landscape where they are competing with paid influencers, AI bots, and anyone who can faux-test and synthesize anything anyone else has tried, I crave a human element that is less about what everyone might want and more about what one person definitely wants. Reviews for reviews’ sake are the root of the recommendations business, but I love to hear from people who simply stumbled upon something wonderful, or solved a long-standing problem in a surprising way or with a really, really good product.

Some will say, perhaps by now even many people are saying, that I expect too much of Wirecutter. They are right. I am a pissy little baby about sometimes being unable to extricate myself from the terror of reality unraveling at the seams while I’m trying to replace my coffee maker. (Okay, fine: Wirecutter is right sometimes, too—Honeylove shapewear and the Takenaka bento box are both great.) Wirecutter tailoring its content exclusively to my taste would be a terrible business model (though my recommendation is that they should give it a shot). At the same time, is it really unreasonable to expect a guide to wedding guest dresses “appropriate for the vibe of the wedding” but that don’t “read ‘bridesmaid’” to steer clear of floor-length cream gowns and drapey, solid-color get-ups that would look right at home in a David’s Bridal catalog?

I recognize that my personal taste is not for everyone, but I do not think people should be advised to wear a floor-length cream gown to a wedding other than their own. I don’t think I’m out of touch on this point; if reality is so decimated that we are now wearing wedding gowns to other people’s weddings, we are beyond help.

A modern aesthete of refined discernment, I am not. I mostly wear t-shirts with cuss words on them and have an expansive collection of unironic trucker hats. I am a home decor maximalist; I own more than one piece of velvet wall art. I like Ren Faires a lot. It is because I have a soft spot for the silly and superfluous that I need good recommendations to tell me when to indulge my whims (when I can afford it) and when not to settle for knockoffs (when I can’t).

A case in point: I am a devotee of Jack Bishop and the America’s Test Kitchen recommendations apparatus, though as a Texan I admit I do hold their northeastern brand bias against them a little bit. But I trust their (literal) taste; to this day I thank ATK for introducing me to Rao’s jarred pasta sauce, which really is the best shelf-stable pasta sauce despite the high price! I promise I can be reasoned with. I’m not just a salty bitch about coat racks. Sometimes the boring thing, the pricey thing, the super-normie thing… really is the best thing.

In a crowded recommendations and reviews field of truly sloppy, ethically questionable nonsense, at least there are real people behind Wirecutter’s recs, even if the everything-to-everyone approach sometimes feels like a human-driven mimic of their computer-generated competitors, which also promise to feel authentic while telling literally anyone exactly what they want to hear. What then am I supposed to do with Wirecutter’s truly goofy choice to defend the credibility of a Zoom animal psychic as the premise for publishing a pet products package??? I do not need to be assured that ghosts are real the next time I’m shopping for the perfect crisp, white bedsheet!

After all, saying “Hey, check this out: It really worked for me!” and “Avoid this shit at all costs!” is more or less how we—humankind—got where we are today. Pet psychics notwithstanding, even if I were a fan of the sleek, inoffensive stuff that, for understandable reasons, dominates the Wirecutter’s aesthetic—along with many of the site’s competitors—I still want to feel like I’m connecting with a person while I’m trawling the internet for hairbrushes and mosquito repellent. Send me down a Sephora reviews rabbithole literally any time! I don’t need a robust parasocial relationship with my preferred stuff-experts, I just love feeling like I know—really know—why somebody liked something and thinks I, or somebody like me, would like it, too.

I wonder if I’m the only person left who thinks people should still do some stuff on their own, or pay other people to do stuff, instead of just yeeting their last remaining brain cells into Sam Altman’s bank account while the world literally burns.

I don’t want to be subsumed into the least offensive and lowest common denominator or have my needs packaged into the algorithmic predictions of a large language model. I love the feeling of being recommended to, rather than recommended at.

As an example: in a recent Kelsey McKinney newsletter, the Defector writer and former Normal Gossip podcast host referenced a website where you can buy a literal tapestry based on a medieval unicorn design; the prices are out-of-this-world, and who knows if they’re offering some real shit, but one way or the other, this medieval nerd is going to find out, because I have a bedroom wall to cover and, why not, $500 to spend. Is it a bad idea? Maybe! The world is on fire! Nothing matters, except all of it! Perhaps I will be scammed, but if I’m scammed I know who to directly bitch about the thing to.

I don’t want to hear about the normal shit that works fine, I want to hear about the wild shit that works great, or looks great, when it maybe shouldn’t. I just want to hear from people with bad taste… people who are, ultimately, just like me.

This piece was edited by Chrissy Stroop and copy edited by s.e. smith.

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