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Loving Pinterest has long been a part of my secretly middle-aged personality. I have 16.1k pins to my name to prove it. I started my account in middle school eight years ago, and Pinterest has been a dear companion to me ever since. I used to log on every day to tuck away precious ideas and artworks into my boards, which I could take out to admire every time I needed advice, a joke, or a drawing lesson. I am not alone in this. Pinterest says that 42% of its global user base is Gen Z. I think Gen Z has really latched onto Pinterest as a safe platform to use, especially with so much happening around other social media platforms, says Lois, whose Tiktok videos about Pinterest under the username dandydemon have garnered over six million views. Pinterest is a very atypical social media platform. It’s not like Instagram, it’s not like TikTok, where youre actively scrolling. It’s a very personalized social media platform, and it feels almost like a journal of sorts for people. But for many users like Lois, a worrying pattern has emerged over the past couple of years. There is so much AI on the platform . . . that it’s hard to determine what [posts are] AI, and where it is coming from, she says. Other people like Reddit user InterationInternal agree. I was looking for hair color inspo and it was all AI. I couldn’t find a single human!! Then [I] typed in nail inspo, interior design – same thing. Is this platform dead? they wrote in a thread titled Pinterest is 100% AI now? R/Pinterest hosts hundreds of posts with similar complaints. Frustration over AI content and the recent mass deletion of user accounts is boiling over to the point where many users are leaving the platform for alternatives. Andy McCune, cofounder and CEO of the curation app Cosmos, says that after launching in August 2024, Cosmos has already gained millions of users. And, in the couple of days after Lois shouted out the platform as a Pinterest alternative in her a video discussing the Pinterest bans, McCune noted that Cosmos saw tens of thousands of new users join the platform. Pinterest says AI slop is not a problem on its platform. Pinterest’s systems are designed to prominently surface high-quality, inspirational content says a spokesperson for the company. Low-quality Gen AI content is therefore not broadly recommended by our systems or widely seen by users. Still, to help address user concerns about the presence of AI generated content on the platform, Pinterest rolled out a new feature to tag AI content in April. To help people determine whether a post contains AI-modified or generated content, Pinterest now analyzes the metadata of its images to look for AI markers. For those that fall through the cracks, Pinterest has also developed classifiers to detect AI generated content automatically. If Pinterest determines that an image is AI generated, it adds an AI modified label when users view it in closeup. As we refine these classifiers, our labels will become even more helpful and accurate, says the spokesperson. Not everyone thinks this fix will be enough. Lois believes that the existence of the AI pins in the first place undermines the utility of Pinterest. I use Pinterest for home decor reasons, she says. I love to imagine what my future home would look like, and also get decor items from Pinterest, and there’s no way to get a decor item that was made by AI . . . the whole point of Pinterest, to me, as far as the commerce side of it is seeing products that I can buy because they exist within reality. Pinterest is piloting a solution for this as well. The company is currently experimenting with a see fewer option for Gen AI pins in categories prone to AI modification or generation such as decor and food. We believe that AI should enhance, not replace, the value provided by our creators. Pinterests algorithms will continue to prioritize content that is inspirational, actionable, and most relevant to individual users, says the spokesperson. Deeper questions about AI on Pinterest Although these features may help users declutter their homepages of AI content, the overall amount of AI generated content on Pinterest will likely keep growing. After studying Pinterests monthly data and trend reports for January through April 2025, the technology-focused newsletter Garbage Day wrote for Sherwood News that every trend that Pinterest has specifically reported as growing since January 2025 has been saturated with pictures created by AI models. In fact, the article asserts that all 16 trends in Pinterests April trends report contained multiple AI generated images in the top 20 search results. The continued encouragement of AI generated images is worrying for many people working in the arts. It’s the sort of indiscriminate use of [AI] that bypasses the very valuable and hard work and the very sophisticated and complex work and creative processes of artists says Robert Brinkerhoff, Department Head of Illustration at RISD. I think one of our chief worries is that visual culture will diminish ultimately because with capitalism as a driving force, quality is not as important as money. Brinkerhoff notes that it is getting more and more difficult for artists to compete with the speed and increasing accuracy of AI generated content. For instance, an exploding area of practice for illustrators in recent years has been in visual development for film, for games, for animation, and many of our students are interested in that, he says. But those industries . . . are losing jobs and they’re being replaced by AI because it’s quite easy to generate that stuff and [AI is] very readily capable of creating stuff quickly. This concept is exactly what AI slop farmers on Pinterest such as Jesse Cunningham bank on. Cunningham openly admits to flooding Pinterest with AI content to make revenue. “I’m talking $10,000 per month on Pinterest . . . using AI images, using AI text,” he says in a YouTube video explaining his process. “On my page, we do 50 to 80 [posts] a day,” he says. We are presenting Pinterest with unique images every single time. This is why its hard to compete with AI. Not to mention that despite launching their new filters on AI content, Pinterest itself continues to use users’ information to train their own AI models. When you save or upload content to Pinterest, we may use it to improve the accuracy, safety and overall performance of Pinterest Canvas, says Pinterest on its Help Center website. What happens when a platform uses AI to train tself to better help people find inspiration to create a life they love, when an increasing number of uploads are AI generated? The more you subtract human beings from making things like art . . . the more dehumanized we become as a society, I think, says Brinkerhoff.
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Honolulu’s coastal Ala Moana Boulevard is a critical road in the Hawaiian capital, but it’s also a major hindrance. With six lanes of fast-moving traffic and few easily accessible crossing points, it’s effectively a hurdle between the city and its main public space, Ala Moana Park, and the broad beach there. Now, a stunning new pedestrian bridge has opened to make it easier to cross that rushing road. Winding its way from the edge of downtown Honolulu over the highway to a boat harbor and the corner of Ala Moana Park, the pedestrian bridge is an elegant piece of urban infrastructure, accented by artwork and connected to a series of paths cutting through a lush tropical landscape. It’s part of Victoria Ward Park, a two-phase publicly accessible open space connected to Ward Village, the 60-acre mixed use development that aims to redefine the urban realm in this part of the city. Developed by Howard Hughes, Ward Village is a blank slate development on former warehouse land that will add, over the course of decades, more than 5,000 units of housing, nearly 1 million square feet of retail, and more than three acres of public greenspace. Several condo buildings are fully occupied and many future condos are already pre-sold, representing more than $6 billion in revenue, according to Howard Hughes’ 2024 annual report. Beyond its Honolulu project, the company made more than $1.75 billion in revenue in 2024, according to Pitchbook. [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] Building a bridge to downtown Greenspace, primarily in the form of Victoria Ward Park, is a key part of the company’s strategy for luring residents and businesses, and turning Ward Village into a new model for urban development in Honolulu. “A goal for Ward Village is to make the overall neighborhood significantly more walkable, comfortable, and safe,” says Doug Johnstone, president of the Hawaii region for Howard Hughes. Born and raised in Honolulu, Johnstone says that while the city is full of world-class amenities, its urban realm can sometimes be lacking. “It’s inherently a little disjointed and difficult to get around,” Johnstone says. [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] That’s why the Ward Village developmentestimated to cost several billion dollars over a planned implementation period that runs through the 2030sset aside the space for the park, and spent a considerable amount of time coordinating with state and local officials to get the pedestrian bridge built. Costing a total of $17.8 million, the bridge is technically a project of the state’s Department of Transportation. It was mostly funded by a federal grant, and Howard Hughes helped pay for the 20% portion of the budget required from local sources, donating land, funding the bridge design and providing environmental documentation. “There’s a lot of folks wearing different hats that are trying to see it through, and making sure also it’s done well aesthetically and experience-wise,” Johnstone says. “It’s complementary to what we’re doing in Ward Village, but also something Honolulu can be proud of.” [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] Ocean-to-inland Making the bridge possible is the existence of Victoria Ward Park, which was designed by Vita Planning and Landscape Architecture. The first phase of the park covers 1.4 acres from the edge of Ala Moana Boulevard inland, and is now open. The second phase, covering roughly 2 acres higher inland and more nestled in the Ward Village development, will finish construction later this year. This ocean-to-inland connection became a guiding concept for the Honolulu park’s design, according to Don Vita, founder of Vita Planning and Landscape Architecture. “Going back and forth from the ocean up to the mountains is a very important cultural orientation in Hawaii and that’s exactly what we did with the configuration and the location of the park,” he says.
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In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Bibb was living in a tight, one-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. He couldnt open his windows because his home was an old office building converted to residential unitsnot exactly conducive to physical and mental well-being in the middle of a global crisis. So he sought refuge elsewhere: a large green space, down near the lakefront, where he could stroll. Unfortunately, Bibb said, thats not the case for many of our residents in the city of Cleveland. A native of Cleveland, Bibb was elected the 58th mayor of the city in 2021. Immediately after taking office, he took inspiration from the 15-minute city concept of urban design, an idea that envisions people reaching their daily necessitieswork, grocery stores, pharmacieswithin 15 minutes by walking, biking, or taking public transit. That reduces dependence on cars, and also slashes carbon emissions and air pollution. In Cleveland, Bibbs goal is to put all residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by the year 2045, by converting abandoned lots to parks and other efforts. Cleveland is far from alone in its quest to adapt to a warming climate. As American cities have grown in size and population and gotten hotter, theynot the federal governmenthave become crucibles for climate action: Cities are electrifying their public transportation, forcing builders to make structures more energy efficient, and encouraging rooftop solar. Together with ambitious state governments, hundreds of cities large and small are pursuing climate action plansdocuments that lay out how they will reduce emissions and adapt to extreme weatherwith or without support from the feds. Clevelands plan, for instance, calls for all its commercial and residential buildings to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. For local leaders, climate action has grown all the more urgent since the Trump administration has been boosting fossil fuels and threatening to sue states to roll back environmental regulations. Last month, Republicans in the House passed a budget bill that would end nearly all the clean energy tax credits from the Biden administrations signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Because Donald Trump is in the White House again, its going to be up to mayors and governors to really enact and sustain the momentum around addressing climate change at the local level, said Bibb, who formerly chaired Climate Mayors, a bipartisan group of nearly 350 mayors. City leaders can move much faster than federal agencies, and are more in-tune with what their people actually want, experts said. Theyre on the ground and theyre hearing from their residents every day, so they have a really good sense of what the priorities are, said Kate Johnson, regional director for North America at C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 mayors fighting climate change. You see climate action really grounded in the types of things that are going to help people. Shifting from a reliance on fossil fuels to clean energy isnt just about reducing a citys carbon emissions, but about creating jobs and saving moneya tangible argument that mayors can make to their people. Bibb said a pilot program in Cleveland that helped low- to moderate-income households get access to free solar panels ended up reducing their utility bills by 60%. The biggest concern for Americans right now isnt climate change, Bibb added. Its the cost of living, and so we have to marry these two things together, he said. I think mayors are in a very unique position to do that. To further reduce costs and emissions, cities like Seattle and Washington, D.C. are scrambling to better insulate structures, especially affordable housing, by installing double-paned windows and better insulation. In Boston last year, the city government started an Equitable Emissions Investment Fund, which awards money for projects that make buildings more efficient or add solar panels to their roofs. We are in a climate where energy efficiency remains the number one thing that we can do, said Oliver Sellers-Garcia, commissioner of the environment and Green New Deal director in the Boston government. And there are so many other comfort and health benefits from being in an efficient, all-electric environment. To that end, cities are deploying loads of heat pumps, hyper-efficient appliances that warm and cool a space. New York City, for instance, is spending $70 million to install 30,000 of the appliances in its public housing. The ultimate goal is to have as many heat pumps as possible running in energy-efficient homesalong with replacing gas stoves with induction rangesand drawing electricity from renewables. Metropolises like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh are creating new green spaces, which reduce urban temperatures and soak up rainwater to prevent flooding. A park is a prime example of multisolving: one intervention that fixes a bunch of problems at once. Another is deploying electric vehicle chargers in underserved neighborhoods, as Cleveland is doing, and making their use free for residents. This encourages the adoption of those vehicles, which reduces carbon emissions and air pollution. That, in turn, improves public health in those neighborhoods, which tend to have a higher burden of pollution than richer areas. Elizabeth Sawin, director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, said that these efforts will be more important than ever as the Trump administration cuts funding for health programs. If health care for poor children is going to be depletedwith, say, Medicaid under threatcities cant totally fix that, Sawin said. But if they can get cleaner air in cities, they can at least have fewer kids who are struggling from asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses. All this workbuilding parks, installing solar panels, weatherizing buildingscreates jobs, both within a city and in surrounding rural areas. Construction workers commute in, while urban farms tap rural growers for their expertise. And as a city gets more of its power from renewables, it can benefit counties far away: The largest solar facility east of the Mississippi River just came online in downstate Illinois, providing so much electricity to Chicago that the citys 400 municipal buildings now run entirely on renewable power. The economic benefits and the jobs arent just necessarily accruing to the citieswhich might be seen as big blue cities, Johnson said. Theyre buying their electric school buses from factories in West Virginia, and theyre building solar and wind projects in rural areas. So cities arent just preparing themselves for a warmer future, but helping accelerate a transition to renewables and spreading economic benefits across the American landscape. We as elected officials have to do a better job of articulating how this important part of public policy is connected to the everyday lived experience, Bibb said. Unfortunately, my party has done a bad job of that. But I think as mayors, we are well positioned to make that case at the local level. Matt Simon, Grist This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
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