Pinterest, the web's de facto mood board, has long been one of the best places for finding and sharing aspirational lifestyle imagery: sumptuous meals, beautiful art and interiors, fashion and beauty inspiration, and an endless list of do-it-yourself home and holiday projects.
Or at least it was. These days, the site is engulfed in a torrent of uncanny AI-generated slop, drowning out the real, human-made content that once thrived there.
Slop is everywhere on Pinterest, frequently ranking in the top results for common searches. It persists across classic Pinterest categories like home inspiration and DIY hacks, fashion, beauty, food and recipes, art, architecture, and more — and often links back to AI-powered content farming sites that masquerade as helpful blogs, using Pinterest as a tool to draw in viewers to useless chum content just to cash in on lucrative display ads.
Pinterest users are frustrated, saying the AI onslaught is making the platform less useful and harder to navigate. But SEO spammers powering Pinterest's slopageddon say they're raking in cash.
Take a search for "healthy recipe ideas." Of the first dozen pins returned, at least six — including the very first result — are AI-generated. Only one was explicitly labeled as synthetic.
The uncanny posts almost all linked back to recipes on spammy websites, frequently helmed by faux food bloggers with AI-generated "headshots."
For instance, look at the so-called blogger and cookbook author behind that top result, a "pineapple chicken and rice" dish. Though the blog post is attributed to a byline simply reading "Sharlene," an author bio to the right of the recipe claims that the person supposedly operating the site is a "passionate cook and busy mom" named "Alice." Alice also has no last name, and her profile pic is clearly AI.
A prominent red button, affixed beneath the fake author's bio, implores site visitors to "Follow Me on Pinterest."
The same phenomenon persisted on other common food-related searches, like "best casserole recipes." Once again, AI-generated images of phony food linking back to AI-powered blog posts were scattered throughout the top pins.
In this case, none were flagged by Pinterest as generated by AI.
We found AI seeping into the top results for nearly every search we attempted, from "gothic architecture" to "fantasy concept art" to many specific hairstyles ranging from "long layered haircut" to "pixie cut ideas."
The site's AI creep spans topics and keywords, and it can blend in surprisingly well, with AI-generated imagery melting seamlessly — at a first glance, anyway — into the aesthetics of the site's human-made content.
A search for "DIY shelving ideas," for example, seemed free of AI at first glance. But when we zoomed in on a few cozy-looking shelving solutions packed with lush plants and stacks of books, we noticed something was off: none of the books had actual titles, and instead simply bore word-ish markings relaying only a fuzzy vibe of a book spine.
Once again, one of these AI-generated images was the very first result in the feed, and none were flagged by the platform or posters as AI-generated.
Like clockwork, when we clicked through to the link associated with that top result, we found ourselves on yet another AI-generated blog post. This one was published on a website titled Recipes Time, with a subheadline reading "Healthy Choices with Amelia."
Amelia, according to a bio on the right side of the page, is said to be a cook. She was "born with a spoon in one hand," it claims, and a "recipe book in the other." Again, though, she has no last name — and the bio's associated image, which depicts a smiling family of three, is dotted with telltale AI artifacts, like hands with too many fingers.
DIY shelving, of course, has nothing to do with recipes. Neither does travel, another subcategory of content found on Recipes Time.
Then again, though, Recipes Time isn't designed to help provide useful information from real experts explaining how to install new shelves — or cook a healthy dinner, for that matter. Instead, a scroll through Recipes Time reveals an expansive catalog of AI-generated articles spanning Pinterest-favorite categories, packed with images that appear to be expressly designed for algorithmic success on the platform.
Put simply, it's AI-generated SEO spam at its finest. Or, from the position of Pinterest's users and creators, at its worst.
Dissatisfaction with the site's descent into slopdom is clear across the web, where users lament that the platform's inability to curb AI creep is eroding Pinterest's usefulness.
"I was looking for hair color inspo and it was all AI. I couldn't find a single human!!" one dispirited netizen exclaimed in a Reddit post. "Then [I] typed in nail inspo, interior design — same thing. Is this platform dead?"
"Every time I search for examples of stuff for my albums it's filled with AI fake pics," lamented another Pinterest-soured Redditor. "I come to Pinterest for real-world examples. It has become garbage."
One frustrated Pinterest user who complained about the service, Josh, says he used to browse the platform "every other day" or so — usually for art and wallpapers, but sometimes for recipes or DIY ideas.
"It's just like finding needles in haystacks now for real art," he told Futurism, adding that the deluge of AI has "devalued" his experience and made it more difficult to find and support human artists and creators.
Pinterest "was a pretty good place to find genuine art from artists," Josh told us. But the "genuine art that I would once explore more of," he continued, is now "just AI in abundance."
***
Jesse Cunningham, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a digital marketer with SEO expertise, is one of the many folks using AI to flood Pinterest with AI-generated content for ad cash. We know so because Cunningham is an avid YouTuber, and has published multiple YouTube videos in which he breaks down exactly how — where he promises viewers that they can make thousands of dollars a month by following his lead.
"I'm talking $10,000 per month on Pinterest... using AI images, using AI text," Cunningham says to kick off one of his videos, which is titled "🤯 $10,000/Month using AI Pinterest" and was published in December.
Cunningham shows a screenshot of an impressive Pinterest Analytics chart, which he says showcases a steep uptick in his pins' success as the result of his AI use.
"This graph right here shows you when we started AI — do you see the arrow right there? We started using AI on this Pinterest account and you can see the outbound clicks — these are outbound clicks, up to almost 5,000 per day," Cunningham triumphantly declares. "That's real traffic, real money going to a website off of this strategy."
Cunningham then breaks down his process, which involves astonishingly little effort on his part.
First he uses ChatGPT to drum up some post ideas and URL slugs; then using a low-effort AI text-generating platform dubbed "Content Goblin," he inputs a few words into a text box and, moments later, returns lengthy, Pinterest-optimized recipes and listicles, complete with AI-spun imagery.
The AI-generated articles, he explains, are then published to a website featuring another fake author. Cunningham's fake blogger is named "Mary," and he has a whole other video dedicated to showing followers how they can spin up their own fake site — which, we couldn't help but notice, looks strikingly similar to the ones we found on Pinterest.
Lastly, after a bit more ChatGPT fiddling, Cunningham uses yet another AI service to quickly generate a slew of clickworthy-looking pins, each overlaid with bolded headline text.
According to Cunningham, quantity is the name of the game.
"If you want to dominate, you need a lot of rods, a lot of lines in the water, like you're fishing," he says. "I want as many hooks in the water as I want. That's why we do so many pins."
Cunningham also showcases his AI-generated pins on his website, where under a headline reading "AI PINTEREST = HUGE OPPORTUNITY," he markets an AI Pinterest "masterclass."
"AI has advanced to the point where you can generate stunning, professional-quality pins with just a few clicks," reads a webpage for the course. "And every pin you see on this page? Created using AI."
"And the best part?" it continues. "Each of these pins takes less than one minute to create."
We reached out to Cunningham with a list of questions about his Pinterest strategy. We included questions about the ethics of his AI strategy, asking whether he believes publishing AI-generated content under fake author bylines is fair to Pinterest users looking to find helpful content and if he takes any issue with the notion that his use of AI to "dominate" Pinterest results by publishing as much content as possible is doing a disservice to real bloggers and creators that use the site to support their businesses. We also asked whether he personally tests any of the recipes he generates using AI before publishing them.
We didn't hear back.
***
In the face of all this, Pinterest hasn't moved to ban AI. Instead, it recently introduced a suite of ad-focused AI tools for marketers who want to rapidly create ads for products using AI.
We reached out to Pinterest with a list of questions about this story. In response, the company insisted that AI isn't widespread on its platform, and defended its embrace of AI.
"Impressions on generative AI content make up a small percentage of the total impressions on Pinterest," read the emailed statement. "As people continue experimenting with generative AI content, we are working to provide users with more control and context over the content they see on Pinterest. Pinterest will continue intentionally leveraging AI, such as our inclusive AI features, to enhance the experience for our users and creators."
Josh, for his part, told us that he'd like to see Pinterest give users like him more control over whether AI is present in their feeds, or at least find a way to reliably mark pins as AI-generated. Pinterest's inability — or unwillingness — to curb its AI problem, he said, is increasingly pushing him to other platforms.
"I use other sites that host wallpapers and artwork such as WallHaven, and while they too have AI content they at least allow users to set a filter to hide/show it," he told us, while "Pinterest is just a firehose with no way of stopping it."
Like Facebook's AI-mangled fake veterans and shrimp Jesuses, or Instagram's since-killed AI-powered fake users, or Google's ever-worsening AI corrosion, Pinterest's inescapable slop problem poses an urgent question: who is the internet even for anymore?
Right now, in Pinterest's case, the answer seems to be that it's for AI spammers, instead of users or good-faith creators — which in turn, means a worse internet for everyone.
More on AI slop: "True Crime" YouTube Channel Busted as Pure, Made-Up AI Slop
Share This Article