Pinterest users are tired of all the AI ​​slop

For five years, Caitlyn Jones used Pinterest every week to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones spotted a creamy slow-cooker chicken and broccoli recipe, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a touch of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to her grocery list. But as she was about to start cooking, after buying everything, one thing stood out: the recipe told him to start by “connecting” the chicken in the slow cooker.

Confused, she clicked on the About page of the recipe blog. A strangely perfect woman smiled back at him, golden light bouncing off her apron and tousled hair. Jones immediately realized what seemed to be happening: the woman was AI-generated.

“Hello, my name is Souzan Thorne! » the page read. “I grew up in a house where cooking was the heart of everything. » The accompanying images were impeccable but strange, the biography vague and generic.

“It seems stupid that I didn’t realize this sooner, but being in my usual rush to errands, I didn’t even think it would be a problem,” says Jones, who lives in California. Leaning against a culinary corner, she prepared the questionable dish, and it wasn’t good: the watery, bland chicken left a bad taste in her mouth.

Needing to vent, she turned to the subreddit r/Pinterest, which had become a public place for disgruntled users. “Pinterest is losing everything people loved, which was authentic Pins and authentic people,” she wrote. She says she has since given up on the app altogether.

“AI slop” is a term for low-quality, mass-produced, AI-generated content that has been cluttering the internet since videos has books has posts on Medium. And Pinterest users say the site is full of them.

It’s “unappetizing mush forcefully fed to us,” wrote Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Safety, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, in his recently published book. taxonomy of the slope AI. And “Souzan,” for whom a Google search yields no results, is just the tip of the iceberg.

“All the platforms have decided that this is part of the new normal,” Mantzarlis told WIRED. “That makes up a lot of the content produced across the board.”

“Enshitification”

Pinterest launched in 2010 and commercialized presents itself as a “visual discovery engine for finding ideas”. The site remained ad-free for years, creating a loyal community of creatives. It’s since grew up to more than half a billion active users. But, according to some disgruntled users, their feeds have recently started reflecting a very different world.

Pinterest’s feed is mostly images, which means it’s more susceptible to AI errors than video sites, Mantzarlis says, because realistic images are generally easier for models to generate than videos. The platform also directs users to off-site sites, and these outbound clicks are easier to monetize for content farms than for on-site subscribers.