Pinterest Users Are Fed Up with the Overload of AI Content

For the past five years, Caitlyn Jones has relied on Pinterest weekly to discover recipes for her son. In September, she came across a creamy chicken and broccoli slow-cooker dish, topped with golden cheddar and a sprinkle of parsley. She quickly reviewed the ingredients and added them to her shopping list. However, just as she was ready to cook, having purchased everything, one detail stood out: The recipe instructed her to start by “logging” the chicken into the slow cooker.

Perplexed, she navigated to the recipe blog’s “About” page. A woman with an unnaturally perfect appearance smiled back at her, golden light glistening off her apron and tousled hair. Jones immediately grasped what was happening: The woman was AI-generated.

“Hi there, I’m Souzan Thorne!” the page announced. “I grew up in a home where the kitchen was the heart of everything.” The images were pristine but unsettling, and the biography was vague and generic.

“It seems silly I didn’t notice this earlier, but in the midst of my usual grocery shopping frenzy, I didn’t think it would be a problem,” says Jones, who resides in California. Backed into a culinary dilemma, she attempted the dubious recipe, which turned out poorly: The watery, tasteless chicken left an unpleasant impression.

Needing to express her frustration, she turned to the subreddit r/Pinterest, which has become a gathering place for disgruntled users. “Pinterest is losing everything we loved, which was genuine Pins and real people,” she posted. She claims she has since completely abandoned the app.

“AI slop” refers to the low-quality, mass-produced, AI-generated content flooding the internet, including videos, books, and Medium posts. Pinterest users report that the site is overflowing with it.

It’s an “unappetizing gruel being force-fed to us,” wrote Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, in his recently published taxonomy of AI slop. And “Souzan”—for whom a Google search yields no results—is just the beginning.

“All platforms have agreed this is part of the new normal,” Mantzarlis tells WIRED. “It’s a significant portion of the content being generated across the board.”

“Enshittification”

Launched in 2010, Pinterest branded itself as a “visual discovery engine for finding ideas.” For years, the site operated ad-free, cultivating a loyal community of creatives. It has since grown to over half a billion active users. However, some disgruntled users claim their feeds now represent a very different landscape.

Pinterest’s feed is predominantly images, making it more vulnerable to AI slop compared to video-centric platforms, says Mantzarlis, since realistic images are typically easier for models to create than videos. The platform also directs users to external sites, and those outbound clicks are simpler for content farms to monetize than on-site followers.