Pinterest Users Are Tired of All the AI Slop
For five years, Caitlyn Jones has uses Pinterest on a weekly basis to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones saw a creamy chicken and broccoli slow-cooker recipe, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a dollop of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to her shopping list. But just when she was about to cook, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: The recipe told her to start “logging” the chicken in the slow cooker.
Confused, she clicked the “About” page of the recipe blog. An unforgettably perfect-looking woman beamed back at her, golden light bouncing off her apron and tousled hair. Jones immediately realized what seemed to be happening: The woman was AI-generated.
“Hello, I'm Souzan Thorne!” read the page. “I grew up in a house where the kitchen was the heart of everything.” The accompanying images were flawless, but strange, the biography vague and generic.
“It seems stupid that I didn't find this out sooner, but in my normal grocery shopping rush, I didn't even think this would be a problem,” says Jones, who lives in California. Back in a culinary corner, she made the dubious dish, and it wasn't good: the watery, sloppy chicken left a bad taste in her mouth.
Needing to vent, she turned to the subreddit r/Pinterest, which has become a town square for disgruntled users. “Pinterest is losing everything people love, which was authentic Pins and authentic people,” she wrote. She says she has since completely sworn off the app.
“AI slop” is a term for low-quality, mass-produced, AI-generated content that clogs the Internet, from videos to books to posts on Medium. And Pinterest users say the site is up to it.
It's an “unappetizing craving that's being force-fed to us,” wrote Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Safety, Trust, and Security Initiative at Cornell Tech, in his recently published taxonomy of AI slop. And “Souzan” – for whom a Google search does not turn up a single result – is only the tip of the iceberg.
“All the platforms have decided that this is part of the new normal,” Mantzarlis tells WIRED. “It's a big part of the content that's being produced across the board.”
“Enshittification”
Pinterest launched in 2010 and sold even as a “visual discovery engine for finding ideas.” The site remained ad-free for years, building a loyal community of creatives. It has since grown up to more than half a billion active users. But, according to some unhappy users, their feeds have recently started to reflect a very different world.
Pinterest's feed is mostly images, which means it's more susceptible to AI slop than sites with videos, Mantzarlis says, because realistic images are typically easier for models to generate than videos. The platform also drives users to outside sites, and those outbound clicks are easier for content farms to monetize than on-site followers.
