Pinterest Plans to Roll Out More Transparent AI Labeling on Posts

Good news for Pinners, with the platform announcing plans to begin broader labeling of AI-generated content in the app soon.

Well, maybe “announcing” isn’t quite the right term here.

Last week, Futurism published a post that highlighted the rising influx of AI generated content in the app, which is now overwhelming some users.

These fake images drive traffic to AI-generated content sites, which the creators can then monetize via Google Ads.

As per Futurism:

“[AI] slop is everywhere on Pinterest, frequently ranking in the top results for common searches. It persists across classic Pinterest categories like home inspiration and DIY hacks, fashion, beauty, food and recipes, art, architecture, and more – and often links back to AI-powered content farming sites that masquerade as helpful blogs, using Pinterest as a tool to draw in viewers to useless chum content just to cash in on lucrative display ads.”

The problem has been noted by many Pinterest users, who are now finding this AI junk so pervasive that the utility of the platform is being reduced.

So Futurism contacted Pinterest with these findings to get its thoughts.

And at first, Pinterest denied that this was a problem, but then, after publication of the post, it revised its stance.

As per Pinterest:

“We have been building labeling of AI-generated or modified content to provide relevant context to users about what they see on Pinterest. We’ll continue to expand these labels in the coming months.”

So good news, Pinterest is looking to improve its labeling of AI generated content, which will ensure that users can more easily spot these posts among the various Pins presented.

It could also enable Pinterest to reduce the reach of the same, but then again, with Pinterest also encouraging advertisers to utilize its own generative AI tools in their Pin visuals, that might not be the direction it wants to go.

Which highlights the dichotomy of AI in social media, in that the platforms themselves are encouraging AI use, which runs counter to the actual human connection pillars that these apps were founded upon.

People go to Facebook to see the latest updates from friends and family, not for AI generated images of their friends as medieval knights. These image generation tools, while impressive for what they are, are not, essentially, social, in that they don’t represent any actual event.

I noted the same when Meta published this bizarre prompt last year.

This is not what social media, as we’ve known it at least, is about, and why Meta believes that people would want to do this, at scale, is beyond me.

Though maybe I’m also moving into “old man yells at cloud” territory, and this really is the way of the future, in using AI to just “imagine” a whole new, more interesting life.

I still don’t get it, and when you see Pinterest contributing to problems like this, it underlines my ongoing concerns about platforms essentially encouraging an AI content collapse.