Hey all, hope you’re well. Stumbled into this one this week while doing a bit of recon on a few other stories. Was too interesting not to share.
It was below freezing this morning, which has me starting to think ahead about winter, skiing, travels, and more. Let me know if there’s anything on your mind when it comes to stories or otherwise. Thanks for reading!
~Kyle
Instagram’s algorithm served me a suggested account the other day that tickled all the wrong parts of my lizard brain. Brooke Wilder seems like a run-of-the-mill gear influencer. She’s posting photos of her tent at sunset, walking on a tree-lined trail wearing a new backpack, or “YouTube” posed on reels promoting her latest gear review. Her latest posts highlight products like the Outdoor Research Echo hoodie, the Osprey Aether 65, and the BioLite Range 500.
But Brooke has never worn that headlamp. Or the backpack, or the hoodie. In fact, Brooke has never worn anything. She’s a homunculus cobbled together with code, an AI-generated persona, and the “byline” of a new “gear review” website (I apologize in advance for the amount of gratuitous quotations) that is itself stitched together by LLMs remixing the work of real people on other gear sites.
I’m not going to link to the site here, because the last thing I want to give it is a backlink. But it doesn’t look like junk. It looks reasonably comprehensive: lots of text, spec tables, scores, pros and cons, etc. It’s not polished, and it does look like a site generated by an LLM (if you know those obvious design cues), but if you don’t spend your days around LLM output, I can easily see the average person on the internet not noticing anything odd.
To be fair, they’re not completely hiding it. The about page on their website makes a pitch for why their “named editorial persona” and their “research” process is better that what’s currently out there. No free samples, no sponsored placements, and every claim traceable to a spec sheet, a lab test or owner review. On the other hand, their Instagram promises “honest reviews, campfire vibes & trail-tested gear,” which at the very least feels like a strong misdirection (naturally, there’s no AI disclosure).
Every gear review on the site runs through a nearly identical template and hits the same beats. If you’ve worked around LLMs enough, you’ll see a litany of AI writing tells. Walls of text, sentences that sound like they’re saying something profound and yet say nothing, formulaic phrasing, odd juxtapositions, and words strung together with a distinctly inhuman cadence. I would be surprised if a human had touched a single sentence on this site.
In one tent review alone: “Here’s the sum that made me sit up.” “Here’s the sum that matters.” “Here’s the sum I keep coming back to.” “Here’s the fine-print moment.” Elsewhere it’s things like “Those two facts are the same fact” and “A lightweight stove is the smallest piece of big decisions.” The review of the Echo hoodie says, “The brief says durability is mixed but doesn’t give a count,” whatever that means.
For a site that swears off “invented field anecdotes,” the “writer” sure does a lot of “thinking.”
And whether you’re pro, anti, or please-stop-talking-about-it on AI, this feels like a rather egregious application of the technology. This goes beyond “LLMs are trained on the work of real humans” to “we scraped a bunch of sites with real humans, that employ real writers to test gear out in the real world, and we’re hoping to steal an affiliate link from them.” The site proudly mentions data and reviews from places like CleverHiker, SectionHiker, Switchback Travel, GearJunkie and OutdoorGearLab, but never once links to the source.