Pinterest Is Being Strangled by AI Slop

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."

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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 " Read More