I, like many others, use Pinterest to find reference images. It’s where I seek out flowers to draw, tomatoes to paint, and furniture to sketch. Lots of people—both photographers and normal people snapping photos on their phones—post aAnything you can think of. Often, I just open the app on my phone and paint whatever pops up. No need to even decide what to paint, something that can sometimes make it hard to even start.
When I started painting again in January, I went back to Pinterest and found it overrun with AI slop. It’s continued to get worse and worse, and it’s now basically unusable. Some images are labeled as generated or modified by AI, but many aren’t. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell what’s fake and what’s not. Last night, I pulled up a photo of a beautiful flower to paint, drew a sketch, then started painting. Looking closely at the flower, I noticed something was off: the stem had a strange metal piece right under the petals. The petals weren’t right either, on a closer look. I considered for a moment to keep painting, but I couldn’t.
I don’t want to paint from AI generated reference photos. A lot of other people who use Pinterest in the same way as me don’t want to either. Images that are labeled as AI or look even remotely like they could be are flooded with comments calling them AI slop, stuff people don’t want to paint. These images are lifeless. The skin of peaches are pristine, not a bruise in sight. Everything is unnaturally shiny. There’s so little movement. Flower stems are much too straight—no bend from the heavy head of a daffodil. The thing about painting from reference, for me, is capturing the tiny details that AI could never replicate.
To my surprise, there is a way to turn it off. There’s no filter option, which is what I expected, but the option to reduce the amount of generative AI art is hidden in your profile settings. Click on your profile, then the settings icon. Under the “refine your recommendations” option, there’s a tab for generative AI. Everything is turned on by default, but you can switch it all off. Unfortunately, you still won’t be free from all AI art. I still get plenty that are obviously AI, and some I suspect. That’s one of the real bummers of AI and how thoroughly it’s infiltrated art—I have to waste so much brain space wondering if something is AI generated. And if it’s not AI generated, it’s probably an advertisement, which also flood the website. Or maybe something is both!
Complicating things even further, some Pinterest users are reporting that their human-made art is getting tagged as being AI generated. Artists told 404 Media that their work, including pieces uploaded before AI technology was widely available, was being labeled as AI. Naturally, this is likely due to Pinterest’s relatively new AI moderation tools. AI is a feature and not a bug for Pinterest. It’s building its own proprietary image generator called Canvas, which is trained on everything uploaded to Pinterest.
“At Pinterest, for instance, we’re 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,” Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said in a Fortune column in January. “I believe AI can benefit our 600 million users for years to come and at a fraction the cost that many associate with the technology.”
Ready even recognizes, later on in the column, that generative AI can’t make the sort of art humans can: “Social media platforms like Pinterest live and die by users’ willingness to share creative and original ideas,” he wrote in January. “Thankfully, humans feed the internet with a trove of new information every day. That information is inspired and validated by a level of creativity, reasoning, and work ethic that even the most advanced generative AI models do not possess.”
He’s so close to getting it, you guys!
