Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it’s destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten worse. AI-powered mods are pulling down posts and banning accounts, AI-generated art is filling feeds, and hand drawn art is labeled as AI modified.\u201cI feel like, increasingly, it’s impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest],\u201d artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. \u201cAlong with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It’s banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oreglia\u2019s Pinterest account is where she keeps reference material for her work, including human anatomy photos. In the past few months, she\u2019s noticed an uptick in seemingly innocuous photos of women being flagged by Pinterest\u2019s AI moderators. Oreglia told 404 Media there\u2019s been a clear pattern to the reference material the site has a problem with. \u201cFemale figures in particular, even if completely clothed, get taken down and I have to keep appealing those decisions,\u201d she said. This pattern is common on many social media platforms, and predates the advent of generative AI.\u00a0\u201cWe publish clear guidelines on adult sexual content and nudity and use a combination of AI and human review for enforcement,\u201d Pinterest told 404 Media. \u201cWe have an appeals process where a human reviews the content and reactivates it when we\u2019ve made a mistake.\u201d It also confirmed that the site uses both humans and automated systems for moderation.Oreglia shared some of the works Pinterest flagged including a photo of a muscular woman in a bikini holding knives, a painting of two clothed women in an intimate embrace, and a stock photo of a man holding a gun on a telephone that was flagged for \u201cself-harm.\u201d In most cases, Oreglia can appeal and get a decision reversed, but that eats up time. Time she could be spending making art.And those appeals aren\u2019t always approved. \u201cThe worst case scenario for this stuff is that you get your account banned,\u201d Oreglia said.r\/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. \u201cPinterest keeps automatically adding the \u2018AI modified\u2019 tag to my Pins…every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then\u2026 the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I\u2019m stuck in this endless loop of appealing \u2192 label removed \u2192 new Pin gets tagged again,\u201d read a post on r\/Pinterest.\u00a0The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out.\u00a0\u201cI actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and \u2018no AI,\u2019\u201d they said. \u201cOn Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled \u2018Hand Drawn\u2019 but simultaneously marked as \u2018AI modified,\u2019 it creates confusion and undermines that positioning.\u201dArtist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they\u2019ve seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as \u201cAI modified\u201d despite being older than image generation tech. \u201cThere is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected,\u201d she said. \u201cEven artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI.\u201dOther users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. \u201cI can’t even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it,\u201d said another post. \u201cI don’t want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete.\u201dArtist Eva Toorenent told 404 Media that she\u2019s been able to cull most of the AI-generated content from her board, but that it took a lot of time. Whenever she saw what she thought was an AI-generated image, she told Pinterest she didn\u2019t want to see it and eventually the algorithm learned. But, like Oreglia fighting auto-moderation and Zakuga fighting to get the \u201cAI modified\u201d label taken off her work, training Pinterest\u2019s algorithm to stop serving you AI-generated images eats up precious time.AI boosters often talk about how much time these systems will save everyone. They\u2019re pitched as productivity boosters. Earlier this month, Pinterest laid off 15 percent of its work force as part of a push to prioritize AI. In a post on LinkedIn, one of the former employees shared part of the email CEO Bill Ready sent out after the lay offs. \u201cWe\u2019re doubling down on an AI-forward approach\u2014prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working.\u201dToorenent removed all her own art from her Pinterest account after hearing the news that the site would use public pins to train Pinterest Canvas, the company\u2019s proprietary text-to-image AI. But she has no control over other users uploading her artwork. \u201cI have already caught a few of my images still on Pinterest that I did not upload myself\u2026that makes me incredibly mad,\u201d she told 404 Media. \u201cIt used to be a great way to get your work seen among other people, but it\u2019s being used to train their internal AI.\u201dOreglia told 404 Media that the flood of AI has changed her relationship to a site she once used to prize. \u201cIt’s definitely affected how I search things and I’m always now very critical about where something came from… although I’ve always been overly pedantic about research,\u201d she said. \u201cIt does make you do your due diligence but it sucks to constantly have to question and check if something is authentic or synthetic.\u201dShe\u2019s thought about leaving the platform, but feels stuck. \u201cI just want to be able to take all my references with me. I’ve been on the platform for about ten years and have very carefully curated it. It’s really nice to be able to just go to my page and search for something I saved instead of having to save everything to folders although I also do that,\u201d she said. \u201cMore and more I’m trying to curate and collect physical references too but some of that can take up space I don’t have so it can be difficult. Having a physical reference library just seems more and more necessary these days\u2026artists have to be adaptable to this kind of thing these days. It’s annoying but not unmanageable.\u201dReady has been vocal and proud about the company\u2019s commitment to forcing AI into every aspect of the user experience. \u201cAt Pinterest\u2026we\u2019re deploying AI to flip the script on social media, using it to more aggressively promote user well being rather than the alternative formula of triggering engagement by enragement,\u201d Ready said in a January column at Fortune. \u201cSocial media platforms like Pinterest live and die by users\u2019 willingness to share creative and original ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"