What the Hell Happened to Pinterest?

Once the hub for finding really innovative creators and DIY inspiration, Pinterest is now a maddening theme park of AI-generated content and aggressive algorithm pushing, with no human in sight.

The great thing about Pinterest was that it offered a free, gigantic storehouse of human creativity. Your personal vision for a new house, bedroom makeover, flattering hairstyle, wedding décor ideas or a unique sewing project could be found and pinned to your own created “boards” for sharing or just to keep for reference.

Touted as the world’s largest visual search engine, Pinterest grew to become probably the most important digital mood/vision board for millions of users. The site boasts an estimated 38 million boards on wedding ideas alone. Once upon a time, each pin led directly to its source: a person, studio, magazine or company where you could find out even more.

I use the past tense not because Pinterest has folded—it is still very much a dominant presence—but because using it now versus maybe even six months ago is an exercise in deep discouragement. It is an infuriating maelstrom of click bait, alluring fake images leading to link farms and “pins” leading you over and over to the same product on Amazon or Etsy.

The company has been tweaking its mission for some time now in order to maximize its profits. It’s clear that the prime objective of Pinterest is to serve ads, or to serve quasi-original content, so that engagement increases apace with all of the new “content” to see. Sometime in the last year or two, however, many functions have been subverted or overrun by faulty algorithms and rampant AI-generated images and content.

Small Library Idea Search Goes Amok

In the days before all this blurring between real and fake, you could find a pin designed like the one below and have a pretty good idea it would lead you to an editorial site—or at least a company blog. I spotted a pin, shown below, that looked really genuine and handmade:

I was unaware, until I clicked again, that the website it’s linked to appears to be about bonsai. From here I was sent erroneously to this blog post supposedly about minimalist home libraries:

This is not a spare room and it is not a cozy home library. Nor is it a real image. The whole website is a generic place filled with AI-generated blog posts and images around home decor and recipes. No bonsai plant in sight. And the woman’s headshot at the top? To quote Andy Dufresne, “she’s a phantom. An apparition. Second cousin to Harvey the Rabbit.”

A fake, designed intentionally to appear that this is a designer’s blog.

When I finally reached the “cozy home library” source, it was nothing but a series of AI-generated copy punctuated by really fake-looking images, like this.

Experiences from Reddit

Reddit is filled with agonized Pinterest users (many of them former users) furious with the site’s baffling transformation. Some are trying to understand what happened and how to recover from it. Others are bitter and blaming a host of ills, from the current CEO to corporate and investor greed. But the singular message was one of anguish. Pinterest was a cherished resource that helped build thousands of small businesses (and even not-so-small brands). Why did this have to happen? Is this the inevitable strategy that allows a mature tech company to survive?

One research site suggests that Pinterest is using tactics like paid search and questionable performance statistics to claim growth it doesn’t really have. Interest is waning and crowds are thinning.

After huge outcry from users about the inability to distinguish between real and AI images, Pinterest did add tags less than one month ago (April 30, 2025).

Complaints on Reddit threads center around the site’s dramatic uptick in ads, low-quality (and even malicious) links and unacceptable ratio of fake-to-real images.

Reddit user on AI-generated images:

“(I’m) here because I just had this same experience trying to find a reference photo for a haircut. I was scrolling and scrolling and maybe 1 in 20 photos was a real person. What is even the point of flooding the site with these images? Every single one is just some unnaturally beautiful woman and somehow they all look exactly the same.

The home decor ones are even worse - for a split second they look good in thumbnail form and then as soon as you open the full image you've got houseplants mysteriously growing out of the walls.”_fernpolley

Reddit user on Pinterest’s strategy:

“AI content isn’t about user preferences—it’s about profitability. Platforms like Pinterest prioritize AI because it generates endless ‘content’ at a fraction of the cost of human creators. They can flood search results with AI-generated material to keep users scrolling, driving up engagement metrics to show off to investors.

The problem is that AI content isn’t adding value—it’s diluting the platform with low-quality, generic junk. Instead of enhancing the user experience, it alienates people. Offering AI tools on demand, as you suggested, would actually make sense, but defaulting it into search results? That’s just prioritizing metrics over meaningful content.”_wighthamster

Reddit user on never-ending ads:

“I hate that when I search for something like a buffet table I am inundated with ads of them. I want to see how people are styling them, I already have one. And you can’t change the filter to be not shopping pins. I’ve almost stopped using pintrest at all. And I used to be on it like 6 hours EVERY DAY!”_MichaelaRay0629

Why it Matters

Surprisingly, the reason why it matters is hard to explain but I am going to try. I respect the technology behind AI and am impressed by the lifelike images it can generate with just a few words of description. Its potential and capabilities are mind-boggling. The uses will only grow and the results will only improve as time goes on.

In home decor and interior design, idealized images help professionals and consumers alike articulate what it is they are striving for. In real estate, a fake-staged interior can still convey a positive impression of a room to someone’s eye and help them decide if the house is right for them even as they acknowledge it isn’t real furniture or artwork.

But for someone like me searching for ideas that are attainable and real, created by human effort and furnished with items that exist in the real world, Pinterest has become a house of mirrors. I want to show something that was actually imagined, designed, built and styled by someone with a beating heart, a brain and a name.

These projects take an enormous amount of time and talent. It’s why even the creators are not always open to having editors like me share them. I totally understand that the work is their bread and butter, and I am working on cultivating my own team and my own projects.

But when I do have the privilege of showing readers these real works of genius, there is a sense of imperfect purity that artifice cannot match. We can borrow, and interpret, and purchase, and yes even copy these genuine designs, knowing that they exist somewhere that is physical.

That’s why I will, with great sadness, walk away from Pinterest and hope that someday it will get real again.