Pinterest’s loyal community is growing frustrated as a surge of AI generated visuals reshapes the platform’s once human curated feel, leaving some longtime users questioning whether it still serves as the creative haven they relied on for years.
Abigail Wendling, 23, said she uses Pinterest to organize nearly every part of her daily life, but her experience changed when she searched for a wallpaper and found a one eyed cat. A search for healthy recipes later surfaced a strange picture of cooked chicken with seasonings sprinkled inside it. Both images were generated by artificial intelligence, part of a growing wave of AI slop spilling across the platform since the arrival of powerful tools like ChatGPT’s Sora in 2024.
Pinterest has tried to curb the problem for users who do not want AI images, but many members told CNN that they feel overwhelmed as the company leans deeper into the technology. Wendling said the experience is draining and noted that she now examines content carefully before trusting it. She added that Pinterest displays more AI content than any other platform she uses.
Embracing artificial intelligence has been a central goal for Pinterest CEO Bill Ready, who took over in 2022. He recently described the company as “an AI powered visual first shopping assistant,” positioning it alongside other tech heavyweights racing to transform online shopping through machine learning. The platform now reaches 600 million monthly users worldwide, half of whom are Gen Z, and its third quarter revenue climbed 17 percent year over year to $1 billion. Ready said AI sits “at the heart of the Pinterest experience.”
But users say that shift has come at a cost. They report more ads, more fabricated images and less of the creative inspiration that once defined the app. Artist Amber Thurman, 41, said she wants to see art crafted by real people, not content produced by prompts typed into software.
The company has made changes in response. It introduced a tuner that adjusts how much AI content appears in feeds and has been labeling generative images throughout the year. A spokesperson said Pinterest aims to prioritize high quality and inspirational posts “whether it’s AI generated or not.” Even so, many users say the tools are not keeping up with the constant flood of synthetic media.
Ready acknowledged that no platform can reliably detect every AI image. That challenge has intensified as Silicon Valley races to commercialize the technology. Pinterest once served as a sanctuary from the chaos of other apps, where users curated mood boards, saved recipes and shared design inspiration. Creators said the platform felt human in ways others did not.
Tech giants now view AI as essential to the next phase of monetization, and Pinterest is banking heavily on its shopping ambitions. Advertiser link clicks grew 40 percent in the latest quarter and have increased more than fivefold in three years. A new AI powered shopping assistant, described by the company as “a best friend,” is part of that strategy.
Still, some longtime users remain uneasy. Creative director Hailey Cole, 31, said she has turned to the alternative app Cosmos for design inspiration. She worried about intellectual property theft and said she has never seen Pinterest as a shopping platform. Wendling added that even when she spots something appealing, she now checks other sites to confirm whether it is genuine.
Experts say AI slop is already embedded in the future of social media. Jose Marichal, a political science professor at California Lutheran University, said users will have to “live with both” flawed machine generated content and new technology as companies seek revenue. Ready compared AI’s trajectory to Photoshop, predicting that nearly all content will eventually be edited by AI in some form.
That evolution may erode the authenticity that made Pinterest distinctive. Researchers said AI posts often redirect users to ad heavy websites that rely on affiliate marketing. In one case, a top search result for a chocolate chip cookie recipe led to an AI generated image and a site filled with ads, while the recipe itself mirrored a ChatGPT query.
The growth of AI underscores the need for stronger media literacy. Experts warn that even negative engagement with AI slop can encourage algorithms to surface more of it. Some Pinterest users have responded by reducing their time on the platform or returning to older communities like Tumblr.
For many, the shift represents a deeper loss. As Casey Fiesler, an information science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, put it, Pinterest once offered a steady flow of inspiring, human made content. Now, she said, “it’s just a lot of very non human, perhaps not inspiring content.”
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