A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I’d signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and I was suddenly flooded with suggestions for more of the same. Which was all well and fine until—whoops—I canceled the wedding and it seemed Pinterest pins would haunt me until the end of days. Pinterest wasn’t the only offender. All of social media wanted to recommend stuff that was no longer relevant, and the stench of this stale buffet of content lingered long after the non-event had ended.
So in this new era of artificial intelligence—when machines can perceive and understand the world, when a chatbot presents itself as uncannily human, when trillion-dollar tech companies use powerful AI systems to boost their ad revenue—surely those recommendation engines are getting smarter, too. Right?
Maybe not.
Recommendation engines are some of the earliest algorithms on the consumer web, and they use a variety of filtering techniques to try to surface the stuff you’ll most likely want to interact with—and in many cases, buy—online. When done well, they’re helpful. In the earliest days of photo sharing, like with Flickr, a simple algorithm made sure you saw the latest photos your friend had shared the next time you logged in. Now, advanced versions of those algorithms are aggressively deployed to keep you engaged and make their owners money.
More than three years after reporting on what Pinterest internally called its “miscarriage” problem, I’m sorry to say my Pinterest suggestions are still dismal. In a strange leap, Pinterest now has me pegged as a 60- to 70-year-old, silver fox of a woman who is seeking a stylish haircut. That and a sage green kitchen. Every day, like clockwork, I receive marketing emails from the social media company filled with photos suggesting I might enjoy cosplaying as a coastal grandmother.
I was seeking paint #inspo online at one point. But I’m long past the paint phase, which only underscores that some recommendation engines may be smart, but not temporal. They still don’t always know when the event has passed. Similarly, the suggestion that I might like to see “hairstyles for women over 60” is premature. (I’m a millennial.)
Pinterest has an explanation for these emails, which I’ll get to. But it’s important to note—so I’m not just singling out Pinterest, which over the past two years has instituted new leadership and put more resources into fine-tuning the product so people actually want to shop on it—that this happens on other platforms, too.
Take Threads, which is owned by Meta and collects much of the same user data that Facebook and Instagram do. Threads is by design a very different social app than Pinterest. It’s a scroll of mostly text updates, with an algorithmic “For You” tab and a “Following” tab. I actively open Threads every day; I don’t stumble into it, the way I do from Google Image Search to images on Pinterest. In my Following tab, Threads shows me updates from the journalists and techies I follow. In my For You tab, Threads thinks I’m in menopause.
Wait, what? Laboratorially, I’m not. But over the past several months Threads has led me to believe I might be. Just now, opening the mobile app, I’m seeing posts about perimenopause; women in their forties struggling to shrink their midsections, regulate their nervous systems, or medicate for late-onset ADHD; husbands hiring escorts; and Ali Wong’s latest standup bit about divorce. It’s a Real Housewives-meets-elder-millennial-ennui bizarro world, not entirely reflective of the accounts I choose to follow or my expressed interests.
Meta gave a boilerplate response when I asked how Threads weights its algorithm and determines what people want to see. Spokesperson Seine Kim said what I’m seeing is personalized to me based on a number of signals, “such as accounts and posts you have interacted with in the past on both Threads and Instagram. We also consider factors like how recently a post was made and how many interactions it has received.” (A better explanation might be that Threads has a rage-bait problem, as this intrepid reporter learned.)
What scares me most about this is not that Meta has a shitbucket of data on me (old news) or that the health hacks I’m being shown might be completely illegitimate. It’s that I might be lingering on these posts more than I realize, unconsciously shoveling more signals in and anxiously spiraling around my own identity in the process. For those of us who came of age on the internet some 20 to 30 years ago, the way these recommendation systems work now represents a fundamental shift to how we long thought of our lives online. We used to log on to tell people who we were, or who we wanted to be; now the machines tell us who we are, and sometimes, we might even believe them.
As for Pinterest, I granted the company access to my account so they could investigate why the app recommends ageist, AARP-grade content to me in its emails. It turns out I hadn’t actively logged in to the app in over a year, which means the data it has one me is, ironically, old. Back then I was researching paint, so the app thinks I’m still into that.
Then there’s the grandma hair: Not only had I searched on Pinterest for skincare products and hairstyles in the long-ago past, but Pinterest gives a lot of weight to data from other users who have searched for similar items. So perhaps those other, non-identifiable users are into these hairstyles. The company claims its perceived relevance for recommendations has improved over the past year.
Pinterest’s suggested solution for me? Use Pinterest more. Un-pin stuff I don’t like. Threads also suggested I can fine-tune my own feed by swiping left to hide a post or tapping a three-dot menu to indicate I’m not interested. It’s on me, young buck. In both cases, I’m supposed to tell the algorithms who I am.
I’m supposed to do the work. I’m supposed to swipe more. I’ll be so much better off if I do. And so will they.
Time Travel
Back in 1999 the author-programmer Ellen Ullman wrote an essay for WIRED titled “The Myth of Order,” about the FUD surrounding Y2K, but mostly about how the (ultimately non-disastrous) event revealed some software systems to be little more than new wrappers applied to old jalopies. Even the most advanced programmers might have a hard time figuring out which wire to cut in the “madman’s electronic bomb” built by someone who came before them.
You can hire new technical wizards, demand more documentation, launch a new app, even, hell, replace an entire leadership team, and the old code will persist.
“It's almost a betrayal. After being told for years that technology is the path to a highly evolved future, it's come as something of a shock to discover that a computer system is not a shining city on a hill - perfect and ever new - but something more akin to an old farmhouse built bit by bit over decades by nonunion carpenters.
The reaction has been anger, outrage even - how could all you programmers be so stupid? Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious. But it's not surprising…Glitches, patches, crashes - these are as inherent to the process of creating an intelligent electronic system as is the beauty of an elegant algorithm, the satisfaction of a finely tuned program, the gee-whiz pleasure of messages sent around the world at light speed. Until you understand that computers contain both of these aspects - elegance and error - you can't really understand Y2K.”
End Times Chronicle
Unfortunately scientists predicted these kinds of hurricanes might be in our future. Donate here. And for the love of god don’t believe conspiracy theories about hurricanes.
Last but Not Least
Two godfathers of AI have won the Nobel Prize! (And it wasn’t in literature; that prize went to South Korean author Han Kang.) I genuinely love stories about people who don’t initially answer the phone when they’ve won a Nobel. Probably spam.
Go read Issie Lapowsky’s profile of White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Now that the Mounjaro and Zepbound shortages are over, Eli Lilly is going after the cottage industry selling “compounded” versions of its meds. Kate Knibbs here on the latest. Just don’t pin this story to your Pinterest board.
I once installed an internet-connected shelf in my linen closet so I’d never have to remember to buy toilet paper again. In the near-future an AI agent might do all the work on the back end (truly no pun intended).
Ring, maker of security cameras, has had its fair share of controversy over the years due to its cozy arrangements with law enforcement agencies seeking footage. Now Ring has removed some of those features and added AI search to its cameras. On our podcast this week Paresh Dave explains why Ring still mistakes blonde people for golden retrievers.
Speaking of, stay tuned for news from WIRED podcasts …
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