For five years, Caitlyn Jones has used Pinterest on a weekly basis to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones spotted a creamy chicken and broccoli slow-cooker recipe, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a pop of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to her grocery list. But just as she was about to start cooking, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: The recipe told her to start by “logging” the chicken into the slow cooker.

Confused, she clicked on the recipe blog’s About page. An uncannily perfect-looking woman beamed back at her, golden light bouncing off her apron and tousled hair. Jones realized instantly what appeared to be going on: The woman was AI-generated.

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

“It seems dumb I didn’t catch this sooner, but being in my normal grocery shop rush, I didn’t even think this would be an issue,” says Jones, who lives in California. Backed into a culinary corner, she made the dubious dish, and it wasn’t good: 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 was authentic Pins and authentic people,” she wrote. She says that she has since sworn off the app entirely.

“AI slop” is a term for low-quality, mass-produced, AI-generated content clogging up the internet, from videos to books to posts on Medium. And Pinterest users say the site is rife with it.

It’s an “unappetizing gruel being forcefully 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 doesn’t turn up a single result—is only the tip of the iceberg.

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

“Enshittification”

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

Pinterest’s feed is mostly images, which means it’s more susceptible to AI slop than video-led sites, says Mantzarlis, as realistic images are typically easier for models to generate than videos. The platform also funnels users toward outside sites, and those outbound clicks are easier for content farms to monetize than onsite followers.

An influx of ads may also be partly to blame. Pinterest has rebranded itself as an “AI-powered shopping assistant.” To do this, it began showering feeds with more targeted ads in late 2022, which can be “great content” for users, CEO Bill Ready told investors at the time. When WIRED searched for “ballet pumps” on a new Pinterest account using a browser in incognito mode, over 40 percent of the first 73 Pins shown were ads.

Last year, Pinterest also launched a generative AI tool for advertisers. Synthetic content enhances users’ ability “to discover and act on their inspiration,” the company wrote in an April blog.

AI slop has proliferated on every social media site in recent years. But Pinterest users say this content betrays the site’s function as a marketplace for trading real-world inspiration.

“It is the antithesis of the platform it once was, unabashedly prioritizing consumerism, ad revenue, and non-human slop over the content that carries the entire premise of the site on its shoulders,” says college student Sophia Swatling. Growing up in rural upstate New York, she struggled to find like-minded creatives who shared her hobbies. Pinterest was a lifeline.

“The greed and exploitation has become steadily more obtrusive and has now reached a point where the user experience is entirely marred,” says Swatling.

The issues Pinterest users raise would fall into a category that Cory Doctorow, the Canadian activist, journalist, and sci-fi author, calls “enshittification,” which refers to the gradual decay of internet platforms people rely on due to relentless profit-seeking at the expense of user experience.

While Pinterest’s user count may be growing, that doesn’t mean they like the slop, Doctorow says. New arrivals may feel there’s no alternative, while old ones may hate slop less than they love the Pins and boards they’ve shared and saved over the years, he explains.

Companies know that people’s digital trails are a “powerful force,” Doctorow tells WIRED, allowing them to act without penalty. “To me, that’s where enshittification lies, right?”

Ghost Stores

If Pinterest hoped that leaning into AI would be enough to accelerate its fortunes, it hasn’t worked out that way. The company’s shares tanked 20 percent in November after its third-quarter earnings and revenue outlook fell short of analysts’ expectations.

Clicking on Pins containing what appeared to be AI-generated images on Pinterest took WIRED to blogs featuring generically worded listicles offering vague advice, paired with pictures that have the eerily polished hallmarks of AI. They were also littered with banner ads and pop-ups.

“It’s like endless window shopping but there is no store, no door, no sign. It’s just really nice-looking windows,” says Janet Katz, 60, a long-term Pinterest user from Austin, Texas. When redesigning her living room this year, she kept noticing images where the furniture dimensions didn’t add up–chairs defying physics, coffee tables balanced precariously on two legs.

“It’s the decor equivalent of the uncanny valley,” Katz says. “It looks close to real, but there’s something not quite right.”

WIRED tried clicking on 25 ads for the search term “ballet pumps” on Pinterest, which led to ecommerce sites that followed a pattern: steeply discounted apparel, no physical address, and often featuring a glossy, synthetic-seeming picture of the boutique’s owner paired with an origin story. “I grew up in a family full of love for art, craftsmanship, and tradition,” one such site declares. On two near-identical sites, retired couples announce they’re closing their doors after “26 unforgettable years” in New York City.

The boutiques have several hallmarks of a phenomenon known as “ghost stores,” an online scam whereby fake websites are created, claiming to sell high-quality products at significant discounts due to closing down.

“The whole means of production around these sorts of campaigns has radically changed,” Henry Ajder, a generative AI expert and cofounder of the University of Cambridge’s AI in Business Program, tells WIRED. “It’s more realistic, it’s less expensive, and it’s more accessible. That all comes together to make a compelling package for saturating platforms with synthetic spam,” he says.

The websites did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. When WIRED shared these sites with Pinterest, they deactivated 15 of them for violating policies that prohibit Pins that link to deceptive, untrustworthy, or unoriginal websites.

“While many people enjoy GenAI content on Pinterest, we know some want to see less of it,” a Pinterest spokesperson told WIRED, referencing tools for users to limit AI-generated content. They added that Pinterest prohibits “harmful ads and content, including spam—whether it’s GenAI or not.”

Searching for Solutions

The influx of AI-generated content has made some users paranoid that content from humans is being lost amid the rising tide.

A common complaint on r/Pinterest is from users who say their impressions have rapidly dropped for reasons unbeknownst to them, but they suspect that AI is drowning them out. Software engineer Moreno Dizdarevic, who also runs a YouTube channel investigating ecommerce scams, has worked with small businesses who share those complaints.

One of his clients, a stay-at-home mom and jewelry maker, no longer receives comments or likes on her Pins, and garners less than 5,000 pageviews each month. She’s found much more success when posting on Instagram or TikTok, says Dizdarevic, because there’s “still a bit more of a human connection,” which offers her an edge.

In April, citing complaints from users, Pinterest introduced “Gen AI Labels” that disclose when content is “AI modified.” Then, in October, it rolled out tools allowing users to customize how much AI-generated content they see.

But the labels only appear once a user clicks on a Pin, not in the feed itself, and they aren’t applied to ads. WIRED found several AI-generated Pins that weren’t labeled as such.

The sea of AI-generated user content and ads has created a paradox for tech firms, Ajder says: “How on earth do you prove that the eyeballs you’re selling are actually eyeballs?” he asks.

Companies may shift toward tools that verify human-made content, says Ajder. The French music-streaming service Deezer, for example, pledged to remove fully AI-generated tracks from its algorithmic recommendations, after disclosing in September that such uploads now make up 28 percent of daily submissions, equivalent to 30,000 songs per day.

For Jones, though, the transformation on Pinterest already feels complete. What was once a place of authentic inspiration has become, in her words, “depressing.”