Pinterest users are tired of all things AI

for five years, Kaitlyn Jones used Pinterest weekly to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones discovered a recipe for creamy chicken and broccoli in the slow cooker, sprinkled with golden cheddar cheese and parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added it to her grocery list. But as she was about to start cooking, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: The recipe told her to start “scoring” the chicken in the slow cooker.

Confused, she clicked on the recipe blog’s “About” page. A strangely perfect-looking woman shone down upon her, golden light bouncing off her apron and tousled hair. Jones immediately realized what seemed to be happening: the woman had been created by artificial intelligence.

“Hi, I’m Susan Thorne!” Read the page. “I grew up in a home where the kitchen was the heart of everything.” The accompanying photographs were flawless but strange, and the biography was vague and generic.

“It seems stupid that I didn’t catch this sooner, but being a regular at my grocery store, I didn’t even think this would be an issue,” says Jones, who lives in California. When she returned to the cooking corner, she prepared the questionable dish, and it wasn’t good: the bland, watery chicken left a bad taste in her mouth.

In need of catharsis, she turned to the subreddit r/Pinterest, which has become a town square for disgruntled users. “Pinterest is losing everything people loved about it, which is original posts and authentic people,” she wrote. She says she has since vowed to stop the app completely.

“AI slop” is a term for low-quality, mass-produced content that clogs the internet, from videos and books to posts on Medium. Pinterest users say the site is full of them.

“It is an unappetizing porridge that is force-fed to us,” Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, wrote in his recently published taxonomy of artificial intelligence. And “Susan,” whose Google search does not yield a single result, is just the tip of the iceberg.

“All the platforms have decided that this is part of the new normal,” Mantzarlis tells WIRED. “It’s a huge part of the content being produced across the board.”

“Activation”

Pinterest launched in 2010 and marketed itself as a “visual discovery engine for finding ideas.” The site has remained ad-free for years, building a loyal community of creators. It has since grown to over half a billion active users. But, according to some dissatisfied users, their feeds have begun to reflect a completely different world recently.

Pinterest’s feed is mostly images, Mantzarlis says, which means it’s more vulnerable to AI regression than video-based sites, since photorealistic images are typically easier for models to create than videos. The platform also directs users towards external sites, and these outbound clicks are easier for the content farmer to monetize from on-site followers.