For five years Caitlyn Jones used Pinterest every week to find recipes for her son. Back in September, Jones spotted a creamy ponderous cooker chicken and broccoli recipe topped with golden cheddar cheese and parsley. She quickly looked through the ingredients and added them to her shopping list. But when she was about to start cooking, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: recipe he told her to start by “logging” the chicken in the ponderous cooker.
She is confused I clicked “About me” page of the blog with recipes. The incredibly perfect looking woman beamed at her, the golden delicate reflecting off her apron and messy hair. Jones immediately realized what was happening: the woman had been generated by artificial intelligence.
“Hello, I’m Souzan Thorne!” page read. “I grew up in a home where the kitchen was the heart of everything.” The attached images were flawless but strange, the biography vague and generic.
“It seems stupid that I didn’t notice it sooner, but when I was rushing to the grocery store, I didn’t even think it would be a problem,” says Jones, who lives in California. Locked in the cooking corner, she prepared a questionable dish that was not good: the watery, flat chicken left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.
Wanting to vent her emotions, she visited the r/Pinterest subreddit, which has become a marketplace for dissatisfied users. “Pinterest is losing everything people loved: authentic Pins and authentic people,” she wrote. She says she has since sworn off the app altogether.
“AI slop” is the term for the low-quality, mass-produced, AI-generated content that clogs the Internet, from movies to books to Medium posts. Pinterest users say the site is full of it.
It’s an “unappetizing gruel that forces itself on us,” wrote Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, in a recently published article taxonomy AI mistakes. And “Souzan” – for which the Google search engine does not provide a single result – is just the tip of the iceberg.
“All platforms have decided this is part of the new normal,” Mantzarlis tells WIRED. “It’s a huge part of universally generated content.”
“Enshitification”
Pinterest was founded in 2010 and introduced to the market itself as a “visual discovery engine for finding ideas.” The site has been ad-free over the years, building a faithful community of creators. Since then adult to over half a billion vigorous users. However, according to some dissatisfied users, their feeds have recently begun to reflect a completely different world.
Pinterest’s feed is made up mostly of images, which means it’s more susceptible to AI errors than video-based sites, Mantzarlis says, because it’s typically easier for models to generate realistic images than videos. The platform also directs users to external sites, and content farms make more money on outbound clicks than on-site followers.