For five years, Caitlyn Jones uses Pinterest every week to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones spotted a creamy slow cooker recipe with chicken and broccoli, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a hint of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to her shopping list. But just as she was about to start cooking, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: the recipe told her to start “logging” the chicken into the slow cooker.
Confused, she clicked on the recipe blog's About page. An eerily perfect-looking woman beamed at her, golden light reflecting off her apron and tousled hair. Jones immediately realized what seemed to be happening: the woman had been AI-generated.
“Hi, 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 silly that I didn't notice this before, but since I'm so busy at the grocery store, I didn't even think this would be a problem,” says Jones, who lives in California. Back in a culinary corner, she made the questionable dish, and it was not tasty: the watery, bland 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 loved, which is authentic pins and authentic people,” she wrote. She says she has since sworn off the app completely.
“AI slop” is a term for low-quality, mass-produced, AI-generated content clogging the internet, from videos to books to posts on Medium. And Pinterest users say the site is full of them.
It is an “unappetizing porridge forcibly served to us,” wrote Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, in his recently published taxonomy of AI doldrums. And “Souzan” – for whom a Google search yields no results – is just the tip of the iceberg.
“All platforms have decided that this is part of the new normal,” Mantzarlis tells WIRED. “It's a lot of the content that's being produced across the board.”
“Enshittification”
Pinterest launched in 2010, marketing itself as a “visual discovery engine for finding ideas.” The site remained ad-free for years and built a loyal community of creatives. Since then, it has grown to over half a billion active users. But according to some disgruntled 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 models can typically generate realistic images more easily than videos. The platform also directs users to external sites, and those outbound clicks make it easier for content farms to monetize than on-site followers.
