Dear Fediverse, thank you for being a safe haven from AI slop.

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@chuckthewriter @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 😄🙌🙌🙌🙌

[jan@social.dytrych.cloud]

@_elena LOL, are you kidding, right? Right? 🤪

[sturmsucht@mastodon.social]

@_elena

it's really barely usable anymore. Search for interior or cabins or gardens - it's a mess. Pinterest has become an AI slop spreader to other platforms like tumblr as well.

@sylvia @bookstardust @lefteristrip23

[jali@mastodon.world]

@_elena The only thing that's missing is that someone Tags AI Slop with an NFT and sells a link to an AI generated image to a crypto-trading-bot.

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@jan I wish! The buyers have no clue it’s all AI generated 😭

[sylvia@social.lol]

@_elena @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 That is just ridiculous! Don’t they know they are killing Pinterest?

Etsy is getting worse too.

I was watching a video by a woman who bought sewing patterns on Etsy. It was ALL Ai.

She had a big problem noticing from the ad what was real and what was slop.

Now she intentionally bought obvious AI patterns because she wanted to show how bad they were, but others have no idea that patterns are all stolen and jumbled together in a mess.

The sad thing is that this kills creativity. This kills small businesses whose patterns were stolen by ai to manufacture slop.

When the bubble bursts, and it will because eventually investors will see it’s melting away their money, it will be brutal.

A new generation of creatives has already been ruined. A lot of small businesses in the creative field will have folded. A lot of writers will have drowned in a sea of ai slop flooding the markets.

It’s brutal. This is why having your own websites right now is so essential.

And yes, even with the knowledge that AI will steal all you put on there. I hope it chokes their machines.

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@sturmsucht that’s so sad 😭 my heart goes out to creatives that relied on it for inspiration and/or exposure.

I wonder what people inside the company think about this devolution…

Disclaimer: I had (well have) a popular camera board on Pinterest (36k followers) and I was even invited by the company in 2017 to do a presentation at their London office. Those were the days…

Now I don’t dare add new pins to it in case they are AI slop 😩

@sylvia @bookstardust @lefteristrip23

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@jali 😂💀

[sturmsucht@mastodon.social]

@_elena

Oh, those innocent 2017 days..

@sylvia @bookstardust @lefteristrip23

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@sylvia it's so sad indeed. Initially I thought: if I worked at Pinterest, I would book an emergency company meeting to brainstorm ideas about how to deal with this... and the resulting exodus of real users.

Yes they did create a filter to turn off AI gen images (but only on desktop).

Thing is, when you report a pin, there is a long list of reasons... but not gen AI. I ultimately think they just don't care... they may see any content upload as a good thing 😭

@bookstardust @lefteristrip23

[sylvia@social.lol]

@_elena @bookstardust @lefteristrip23

I think you hit the nail on the head with that last line: any content is good content to them.

They show they really don't care just with omitting the gen ai option from the report function.

I really loved pinterest, it was a great anti anxiety thing for me to fill my boards, but I just don't care anymore. And even with the filter on, I suspect some images!

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@sylvia aw yes Sylvia, it was my happy place too and I'm so sad about what happened to it.

If I ever return to it, it will only be to browse existing pins I had saved. I'll bookmark my collections homepage now, so I can skip the main feed.

I don't trust the feed one bit and it makes me sad to see gen AI imagery in there 😭