Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story<\/p>\n
For five years, Caitlyn Jones has used Pinterest on a weekly basis to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones spotted a creamy chicken and broccoli slow-cooker recipe, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a pop of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to her grocery list. But just as she was about to start cooking, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: The recipe told her to start by \u201clogging\u201d the chicken into the slow cooker.<\/p>\n
Confused, she clicked on the recipe blog\u2019s \u201cAbout\u201d page. An uncannily perfect-looking woman beamed back at her, golden light bouncing off her apron and tousled hair. Jones realized instantly what appeared to be going on: The woman was AI-generated.<\/p>\n
\u201cHi there, I\u2019m Souzan Thorne!\u201d the page read. \u201cI grew up in a home where the kitchen was the heart of everything.\u201d The accompanying images were flawless but odd, the biography vague and generic.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems dumb I didn\u2019t catch this sooner, but being in my normal grocery shop rush, I didn\u2019t even think this would be an issue,\u201d says Jones, who lives in California. Backed into a culinary corner, she made the dubious dish, and it wasn\u2019t good: The watery, bland chicken left a bad taste in her mouth.<\/p>\n
Needing to vent, she turned to the subreddit r\/Pinterest, which has become a town square for disgruntled users. \u201cPinterest is losing everything people loved, which was authentic Pins and authentic people,\u201d she wrote. She says that she\u2019s since sworn off the app entirely.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI slop\u201d is a term for low-quality, mass-produced, AI-generated content clogging up the internet, from videos to books to posts on Medium. And Pinterest users say the site is rife with it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an \u201cunappetizing gruel being forcefully fed to us,\u201d Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, wrote in his recently published taxonomy of AI slop. And \u201cSouzan\u201d\u2014for whom a Google search doesn\u2019t turn up a single result\u2014is only the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll platforms have decided this is part of the new normal,\u201d Mantzarlis tells WIRED. \u201cIt is a huge part of the content being produced across the board.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pinterest launched in 2010 and marketed itself as a \u201cvisual discovery engine for finding ideas.\u201d The site remained ad-free for years, building a loyal community of creatives. It has since grown to over half a billion active users. But, according to some unhappy users, their feeds have begun to reflect a very different world in recently.<\/p>\n
Pinterest\u2019s feed is mostly images, which means it\u2019s more susceptible to AI slop than video-led sites, says Mantzarlis, as realistic images are typically easier for models to generate than videos. The platform also funnels users toward outside sites, and those outbound clicks are easier for content farms to monetize than on-site followers.<\/p>\n
An influx of ads may also be partly to blame. Pinterest has rebranded itself as an \u201cAI-powered shopping assistant.\u201d To do this, it began showering feeds with more targeted ads in late 2022, which can be \u201cgreat content\u201d for users, CEO Bill Ready told investors at the time. When WIRED searched for \u201cballet pumps\u201d on a new Pinterest account using a browser in incognito mode, over 40 percent of the first 73 Pins shown were ads.<\/p>\n
Last year, Pinterest also launched a generative AI tool for advertisers. Synthetic content enhances users\u2019 ability \u201cto discover and act on their inspiration,\u201d the company wrote in an April blog.<\/p>\n
AI slop has proliferated on every social media site in recent years. But Pinterest users say this content betrays the site\u2019s function as a marketplace for trading real-world inspiration.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is the antithesis of the platform it once was, unabashedly prioritizing consumerism, ad revenue, and non-human slop over the content that carries the entire premise of the site on its shoulders,\u201d says college student Sophia Swatling. Growing up in a rural upstate New York, she struggled to find likeminded creatives who shared her hobbies. Pinterest was a lifeline.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe greed and exploitation has become steadily more obtrusive, and has now reached a point where the user experience is entirely marred,\u201d says Swatling.<\/p>\n
The issues Pinterest users raise would fall into a category that Cory Doctorow, the Canadian activist, journalist and sci-fi author, calls \u201censhittification,\u201d which refers to the gradual decay of internet platforms people rely on due to relentless profit-seeking at the expense of user experience.<\/p>\n
While Pinterest\u2019s user count may be growing, that doesn\u2019t mean they like the slop, Doctorow says. New arrivals may feel there\u2019s no alternative, while old ones may hate slop less than they love the Pins and boards they\u2019ve shared and saved over the years, he explains.<\/p>\n
Companies know that people's digital trails are a \u201cpowerful force,\u201d Doctorow tells WIRED, allowing them to act without penalty. \u201cTo me, that's where enshittification lies, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
If Pinterest hoped that leaning into AI would be enough to accelerate its fortunes, it hasn\u2019t worked out that way. The company's shares tanked 20 percent last month after its third quarter earnings and revenue outlook fell short of analysts' expectations.<\/p>\n
Clicking on Pins containing what appeared to be AI-generated images on Pinterest took WIRED to blogs featuring generically-worded listicles offering vague advice, paired with pictures that have the eerily polished hallmarks of AI. They were also littered with banner ads and pop-ups.<\/p>\n
"It's like endless window shopping but there is no store, no door, no sign. It's just really nice-looking windows,\u201d says Janet Katz, 60, a long-term Pinterest user from Austin, Texas. When redesigning her living room this year, she kept noticing images where the furniture dimensions didn\u2019t add up\u2013chairs defying physics, coffee tables balanced precariously on two legs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the d\u00e9cor equivalent of the uncanny valley,\u201d Katz says. \u201cIt looks close to real, but there\u2019s something not quite right.\u201d<\/p>\n
WIRED tried clicking on 25 ads for the search term \u201cballet pumps\u201d on Pinterest, which led to ecommerce sites that followed a pattern: steeply discounted apparel, no physical address, and often featuring a glossy, synthetic-seeming picture of the boutique\u2019s owner paired with an origin story. \u201cI grew up in a family full of love for art, craftsmanship, and tradition,\u201d one such site declares. On two near-identical sites, retired couples announce they\u2019re closing their doors after \u201c26 unforgettable years\u201d in New York City.<\/p>\n
The boutiques have several hallmarks of a phenomenon known as \u201cghost stores,\u201d an online scam whereby fake websites are created, claiming to sell high-quality products at significant discounts due to closing down.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole means of production around these sorts of campaigns has radically changed,\u201d Henry Ajder, a generative AI expert and co-founder of the University of Cambridge\u2019s AI in Business Program, tells WIRED. \u201cIt\u2019s more realistic, it\u2019s less expensive, and it\u2019s more accessible. That all comes together to make a compelling package for saturating platforms with synthetic spam,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The websites did not respond to WIRED\u2019s request for comment. When WIRED shared these sites with Pinterest, they deactivated 15 of them for violating policies that prohibit Pins that link to deceptive, untrustworthy or unoriginal websites.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile many people enjoy GenAI content on Pinterest, we know some want to see less of it,\u201d a Pinterest spokesperson told WIRED, referencing tools for users to limit AI-generated content. They added that Pinterest prohibits \u201charmful ads and content, including spam\u2014whether it\u2019s GenAI or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
The influx of AI-generated content has made some users paranoid that content from humans is being lost amid the rising tide.<\/p>\n
A common complaint on r\/Pinterest is from users who say their impressions have rapidly dropped for reasons unbeknownst to them, but they suspect that AI is drowning them out. Software engineer Moreno Dizdarevic, who also runs a YouTube channel investigating ecommerce scams, has worked with small businesses who share those complaints.<\/p>\n
One of his clients, a stay-at-home mom and jewelry maker, no longer receives comments or likes on her Pins, and garners less than 5,000 page views each month. She\u2019s found much more success when posting on Instagram or TikTok, says Dizdarevic, because there's \u201cstill a bit more of a human connection,\u201d which offers her an edge.<\/p>\n
In April, citing complaints from users, Pinterest introduced \u201cGen AI Labels\u201d that disclose when content is \u201cAI modified.\u201d Then, in October, it rolled out tools allowing users to customize how much AI-generated content they see.<\/p>\n
But the labels only appear once a user clicks on a Pin, not in the feed itself, and they aren\u2019t applied to ads. WIRED found several AI-generated Pins that weren\u2019t labeled as such.<\/p>\n
The sea of AI-generated user content and ads has created a paradox for tech firms, Ajder says: \u201cHow on earth do you prove that the eyeballs you\u2019re selling are actually eyeballs?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n
Companies may shift toward tools that verify human-made content, says Ajder. The French music-streaming service Deezer, for example, pledged to remove fully AI-generated tracks from its algorithmic recommendations, after disclosing in September that such uploads now make up 28 percent of daily submissions, equivalent to 30,000 songs per day.<\/p>\n
For Jones, though, the transformation on Pinterest already feels complete. What was once a place of authentic inspiration has become, in her words, \u201cdepressing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story For five years, Caitlyn Jones has used Pinterest on a weekly basis to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones spotted a creamy chicken and broccoli slow-cooker recipe, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a pop of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-41532","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}