AI slop has come for just about everything in your digital life, and it’s found itself a cozy home in your social media feeds. It’s everywhere, and even if it can sometimes be entertaining, the bulk of it is useless, misleading or downright lies. While some platforms take no issue with this type of content, some are putting controls into your hands so you can at least tone it down, like Pinterest. 

Pinterest made updates to its platform’s user settings on web and mobile so users can reduce the amount of AI-generated posts they see in their feeds. Now, that’s not to say it’s allowing users to remove all AI posts — just some — but some is better than none, especially if your feeds have become overrun with the nonsense.  

Below, we’ll show you how to find the new settings so you can adjust the amount of AI posts you see on your Pinterest feed. 

How to reduce AI in your Pinterest feed

You can find the new settings this way:

1. Head to the home feed tuner section of your Pinterest account.
2. Locate the new GenAI Interests tab there. 
3. Use that tab to limit the number of AI posts you see on your home feed by toggling the «switch to off» position. 

Pinterest says it’s starting with categories that are highly prone to AI-generated or modified content. The company expects to add more options based on user feedback. 

It’s essential to note that nowhere does it state that the new settings will eliminate AI-generated content. Rather, they’ll reduce it in specific categories. 

Pinterest Chief Technology Officer Matt Madrigal says the site isn’t looking to eliminate all AI-generated posts, adding that the new controls strike «the right balance between human creativity and AI innovation.» While some users may want the option to completely turn off AI generated social media posts, it’s essentially unavoidable. At the very least, Pinterest is giving its users some control. 

A former NPR radio host has sued Google and its parent company Alphabet, alleging that the tech giant used his voice for its NotebookLM AI product.

David Greene, former host of NPR’s Morning Edition and current host of KCRW’s Left, Right & Center, filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County. «Google used Mr. Greene’s voice without authorization and then used those stolen copies to develop, train, and refine its AI broadcasting product, NotebookLM,» the lawsuit alleges.

NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that generates insights from data that you input into the system. Google last year introduced audio and video overviews for NotebookLM. In the case of the former, someone using the software can generate an AI podcast based on information in a file you upload. Greene says that others began informing him after the fall 2024 addition of the feature that one of the voices in those podcasts sounded a lot like his.

«These allegations are baseless,» a Google spokesperson told CNET. «The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired.» Google has not identified the voice actor that it says it paid for work on NotebookLM.

According to the lawsuit, Greene said he hired an independent forensic software company that specializes in voice recognition to compare his voice to the one in question on NotebookLM.

«The company conducted a thorough analysis of the voice similarity between Mr. Greene’s voice and the voice used in NotebookLM,» the lawsuit says. «The tests indicated a confidence rating of 53%-60% (on a -100% to 100% scale) that Mr. Greene’s voice was used to train the software driving NotebookLM.»

The voices of professional voice actors or celebrities have been the subject of previous complaints, lawsuits and licensing deals. In 2024, Scarlett Johansson raised concerns about an OpenAI voice that sounded similar to hers. The company removed the sound-alike. Last year, ElevenLabs struck a deal to license voices from celebrities including Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine.

AI slop has infected every social media platform, from soulless images to bizarre videos and superficially literate text. The vast majority of US adults who use social media (94%) believe they encounter content that was created or altered by AI, but only 44% of US adults say they’re confident they can tell real photos and videos from AI-generated ones, according to an exclusive CNET survey. That’s a big problem.

There are a lot of different ways people are fighting back against AI content. Some solutions are focused on better labels for AI-created content, since it’s harder than ever to trust our eyes. Of the 2,443 respondents who use social media, half (51%) believed we need better AI labels online. Others (21%) believe there should be a total ban on AI-generated content on social media. Only a small group (11%) of respondents say they find AI content useful, informative or entertaining.

AI isn’t going anywhere, and it’s fundamentally reshaping the internet and our relationship with it. Our survey shows that we still have a long way to go to reckon with it.

Key findings

• Most US adults who use social media (94%) believe they encounter AI content on social media, yet far fewer (44%) can confidently distinguish between real and fake images and videos.
• Many US adults (72%) said they take action to determine if an image or video is real, but some don’t do anything, particularly among Boomers (36%) and Gen Xers (29%).
• Half of US adults (51%) believe AI-generated and edited content needs better labeling. 
• One in five (21%) believe AI content should be prohibited on social media, with no exceptions.

US adults don’t feel they can spot AI media

Seeing is no longer believing in the age of AI. Tools like OpenAI’s Sora video generator and Google’s Nano Banana image model can create hyperrealistic media, with chatbots smoothly assembling swaths of text that sound like a real person wrote them. 

So it’s understandable that a quarter (25%) of US adults say they aren’t confident in their ability to distinguish real images and videos from AI-generated ones. Older generations, including Boomers (40%) and Gen X (28%), are the least confident. If folks don’t have a ton of knowledge or exposure to AI, they’re likely to feel unsure about their ability to accurately spot AI.

People take action to verify content in different ways

AI’s ability to mimic real life makes it even more important to verify what we’re seeing online. Nearly three in four US adults (72%) said they take some form of action to determine whether an image or video is real when it piques their suspicions, with Gen Z being the most likely (84%) of the age groups to do so. The most obvious — and popular — method is closely inspecting the images and videos for visual cues or artifacts. Over half of US adults (60%) do this. 

But AI innovation is a double-edged sword; models have improved rapidly, eliminating the previous errors we used to rely on to spot AI-generated content. The em dash was never a reliable sign of AI, but extra fingers in images and continuity errors in videos were once prominent red flags. Newer AI models usually don’t make those pedestrian mistakes. So we all have to work a little bit harder to determine what’s real and what’s fake.

As visual indicators of AI disappear, other forms of verifying content are increasingly important. The next two most common methods are checking for labels or disclosures (30%) and searching for the content elsewhere online (25%), such as on news sites or through reverse image searches. Only 5% of respondents reported using a deepfake detection tool or website.

But 25% of US adults don’t do anything to determine if the content they’re seeing online is real. That lack of action is highest among Boomers (36%) and those in Gen X (29%). This is worrisome — we’ve already seen that AI is an effective tool for abuse and fraud. Understanding the origins of a post or piece of content is an important first step to navigating the internet, where anything could be falsified.

Half of US adults want better AI labels

Many people are working on solutions to deal with the onslaught of AI slop. Labeling is a major area of opportunity. Labeling relies on social media users to disclose that their post was made with the help of AI. This can also be done behind the scenes by social media platforms, but it’s somewhat difficult, which leads to haphazard results. That’s likely why 51% of US adults believe that we need better labeling on AI content, including deepfakes. Support was strongest among Millennials and Gen Z, at 56% and 55%, respectively.

Other solutions aim to control the flood of AI content shared on social media. All of the major platforms allow AI-generated content, as long as it doesn’t violate their general content guidelines — nothing illegal or abusive, for example. But some platforms have introduced tools to limit the amount of AI-generated content you see in your feeds; Pinterest rolled out its filters last year, while TikTok is still testing some of its own. The idea is to give every person the ability to permit or exclude AI-generated content from their feeds.

But 21% of respondents believe that AI content should be prohibited on social media altogether, no exceptions allowed. That number is highest among Gen Z at 25%. When asked if they believed AI content should be allowed but strictly regulated, 36% said yes. Those low percentages may be explained by the fact that only 11% find AI content provides meaningful value — that it’s entertaining, informative or useful — and that 28% say it provides little to no value.

How to limit AI content and spot potential deepfakes

Your best defense against being fooled by AI is to be eagle-eyed and trust your gut. If something is too weird, too shiny or too good to be true, it probably is. But there are other steps you can take, like using a deepfake detection tool. There are many options; I recommend starting with the Content Authenticity Initiative‘s tool, since it works with several different file types. 

You can also check out the account that shared the post for red flags. Many times, AI slop is shared by mass slop producers, and you’ll easily be able to see that in their feeds. They’ll be full of weird videos that don’t seem to have any continuity or similarities between them. You can also check to see if anyone you know is following them or if that account isn’t following anyone else (that’s a red flag). Spam posts or scammy links are also indications that the account isn’t legit.

If you want to limit the AI content you see in your social feeds, check out our guides for turning off or muting Meta AI in Instagram and Facebook and filtering out AI posts on Pinterest. If you do encounter slop, you can mark the post as something you’re not interested in, which should indicate to the algorithm that you don’t want to see more like it. Outside of social media, you can disable Apple Intelligence, the AI in Pixel and Galaxy phones and Gemini in Google Search, Gmail and Docs. 

Even if you do all this and still get occasionally fooled by AI, don’t feel too bad about it. There’s only so much we can do as individuals to fight the gushing tide of AI slop. We’re all likely to get it wrong sometimes. Until we have a universal system to effectively detect AI, we have to rely on the tools we have and our ability to educate each other on what we can do now.

Methodology

CNET commissioned YouGov Plc to conduct the survey. All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. The total sample size was 2,530 adults, of which 2,443 use social media. Fieldwork was undertaken Feb. 3-5, 2026. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18 plus).