Why Shouldn't I Spam Pinterest With AI Images?

[mmm91492]

I've always been curious about Pinterest and now with everything going on with Google and all the new AI image generators it seems like a good moment to give it a go.

From what I've read, the key to cracking Pinterest is consistent volume over time. Pin a lot, often. I tried doing that in the past but couldn't streamline it enough to get the ball rolling and keep it going consistently. This time I would want to automate as much of the process as I can to avoid that.

My idea is basically a listicle slideshow type site where each post is a slideshow of images all related to a certain topic. Since this is focused on Pinterest, I'm thinking lifestyle-type content. Think architecture/garden/furniture-porn. 43 Gorgeous Gardens to Read In. 29 Cozy Cabins to Wait Out Winter. That kind of stuff.

I'd monetize with display ads and each image/slide would have its own URL to reload ads each time the user clicks or swipes for the next one. I'd also collect emails and build out an autoresponder.

I've heard Midjourney images do well on Pinterest, so it seems like the big thing here would be building a system that could automatically generate a bunch of those images through an API. Better yet, if I could also get AI to generate all the Midjourney prompt variations based off of the post title, even better.

I didn't realize this but I guess Midjourney is primarily accessed through a bot that runs on Discord? That's crazy to me. It looks like this other company built a Midjourney REST API though, which seems to do what I would need it to do.

Once the images for a post are all generated, I would pin (or schedule) each one (probably figure out some way to autoformat them for vertical, add text, etc.) to Pinterest via their API.

So theoretically with this system in place I could come up with some post idea and have an automated pipeline that would then result in some number of new pins posted on Pinterest pointed at my site. That would make it much easier to pin at the velocity and consistency needed to really succeed on Pinterest.

My suspicion is that if I put this thing together, it would make money. Am I on the right track here? What's the best reason why I shouldn't do this?

 

[Steve Brownlie]

My suspicion is that if I put this thing together, it would make money. Am I on the right track here? What's the best reason why I shouldn't do this?

I haven't tried Pinterest since I had a VA spend an hour a day pinning and doing all that stuffs and it got some traffic but you know what it was like back then - yay Google - everything else seemed boring .

But in general terms people are killing it with fake AI girls on even Instagram and not getting banned so...

I think we're in the era of experimentation with AI. Just try things out and see what you get away with - if it works you can always like the mob used to in the US 'take the family legitimate' and use the account properly. If it doesn't work but short term works then you can probably make some money in the short term and what did you lose?

I'm experimenting with all sorts of misc AI things at the moment. Some will turn out rubbish - but that's just what we all had to do back in the old SEO experimentation days when nobody really knew anything and basically everything worked if you did enough of it - hopefully AI will be similar!

 

[chubes]

Are you not going to look at the images first before you publish them? I think this sounds like a good idea but automating Midjourney sounds pretty difficult.

Not sure if you have used it, but it generates 4 images with each prompt and then you have to select the best one. Sometimes it takes some tweaking to get something usable. Meaning, you have to use the "Variations" and "Remix" feature to get what you want.

A lot of the "chaos" element that is discussed around here for Chat GPT, i.e. giving random responses at times, is definitely present in Midjourney too. Sometimes the AI just does "AI" things that you have to notice or else the image is way too obviously made by AI.

Not trying to be a naysayer. I'm trying to do something similar with Pinterest. Been using Midjourney almost daily for about a full year now, and using it on Pinterest for about a month. Results are promising so far.

High Quality Spam (can hardly tell its AI spam) vs. Low Quality Spam (Obvious shitty AI spam)

 

[mmm91492]

Are you not going to look at the images first before you publish them? I think this sounds like a good idea but automating Midjourney sounds pretty difficult.

Not sure if you have used it, but it generates 4 images with each prompt and then you have to select the best one. Sometimes it takes some tweaking to get something usable. Meaning, you have to use the "Variations" and "Remix" feature to get what you want.

A lot of the "chaos" element that is discussed around here for Chat GPT, i.e. giving random responses at times, is definitely present in Midjourney too. Sometimes the AI just does "AI" things that you have to notice or else the image is way too obviously made by AI.

Not trying to be a naysayer. I'm trying to do something similar with Pinterest. Been using Midjourney almost daily for about a full year now, and using it on Pinterest for about a month. Results are promising so far.

High Quality Spam (can hardly tell its AI spam) vs. Low Quality Spam (Obvious shitty AI spam)

Oh I'll probably do a manual review once everything is generated, although I'm probably more interested in seeing the effects a system like this has at scale rather than harping too much on quality, especially at the beginning. If the Pinterest analytics graphs are going up, that's what's important to me.

The third party API I found is pretty interesting, although it only has API commands for the initial generation and first upscale.

Yesterday I built out the system to make API calls from my website and have that working and generating images remotely. Next step is to save the generated image URLs into the Media Library.

@chubes are you or a VA generating each image manually? How many rounds does it take for you to get an image you're happy with? Your audience doesn't know they're ai images, or do they just not care? For actual content monetization, are you just trying to get them on the page to serve up some display ads or do you actually have text you want them to read and engage with? I figured Pinterest users wouldn't be super keen on sticking around and reading a bunch.

 

[chubes]

Yesterday I built out the system to make API calls from my website and have that working and generating images remotely. Next step is to save the generated image URLs into the Media Library.

@chubes are you or a VA generating each image manually? How many rounds does it take for you to get an image you're happy with? Your audience doesn't know they're ai images, or do they just not care? For actual content monetization, are you just trying to get them on the page to serve up some display ads or do you actually have text you want them to read and engage with? I figured Pinterest users wouldn't be super keen on sticking around and reading a bunch.

Remote image generation via an API sounds epic if you have an idea that works for it.

I'm doing it all myself, a few every day. The amount of time depends on the idea, as Steve said it's a lot of experimenting. Sometimes the first prompt gives me a golden nugget, other times it takes more effort to get what I want.

I'm mostly just pointing the Pins at the articles that have been my top performers on Google for a long time and have the most "visual appeal."

I have no idea if anybody knows they are AI images. Nobody has said anything. I bet they don't care, some of the art I'm pinning is really cool, honestly. Like stuff I'd personally wear on a t-shirt or hang on a wall.

Sometimes I find a top performing piece of artwork on Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, or whatever, and use Midjourney's "Describe" feature on it to basically create something similar for my own use. Then tweak that. Seems pretty shady but I don't really care, I need to eat.

Right now I'm just trying to get users on the page which has well-written and engaging informational content on it + ads and newsletter signup prompts. Some of the pins are directed at forum posts too and some even at the homepage or archive pages.

I don't think I have enough data yet to really assess engagement. I think it really depends on the topic and the content on the page. Average engagement time so far seems right in line with other social channels.

 

[mmm91492]

Making good progress here.

I put together a basic queue structure for managing image generation requests to avoid overloading my webserver and hitting API rate limits. Every minute a cron job is pulling a few requests out of the queue, checking where they are in the process, and performing the next step (eg sending a new request to the API, checking a pending request's API endpoint to see if the image has been generated and can be saved to the Media Library, etc.).

The end result of all this is that I now have a system where I can enter some Midjourney prompts into an ACF repeater field, and a few minutes later I have the corresponding images sitting in my Media Library without any other manual actions. Pretty cool. There's still some work to do here tying the image ID back into the correct repeater row field, but that's easy to do later and what I have so far is proof of concept for a big part of this project.

The next step here is figuring out the Pinterest side.

I know that Midjourney lets you specify aspect ratios and do things like regenerate the same image zoomed in or out, which means I could theoretically have it generate two different unique copies of the same image, a tall one for Pinterest and then like a higher def 16:9 version to show on the site. I also know the API I'm using to connect to Midjourney has some limitations though, specifically when it comes to follow-up prompts on the same image. I may have to resort to just cropping the generated image to create the pin. Stuff to think about.

Maybe I'm even thinking about this all wrong. Each Midjourney request generates four unique images, and it seems wasteful to only use one. Maybe the pin shows all four images and if the user clicks through to the site they can see the high def images and vote for their favorite? That could be cool because it would give me something to stick in like a weekly autoresponder: top-voted images this week. But I've tried building stuff like this in the past and not gotten much engagement from users.

I'm probably getting ahead of myself. First things first let me get something, anything, auto-posting to Pinterest. Looks like there's a PHP library for the Pinterest API so at least that gives me a head start there.