AI Grifters are Coming For Crochet Pinterest
In a new series I’m calling AI Griftwatch I’m looking at different scams being run by savvy users of generative AI looking to make some easy money. While I don’t think every business idea using generative AI or LLMs is a con, I do think there’s fertile ground for crafty users to make a quick buck using some readily available tools and relying on the ignorance of many internet-users.
Today’s AI Grift is a clever one I’ve noticed on Pinterest over the last few weeks. As an avid crocheter, I often use Pinterest to look for inspiration or new patterns to try. However, I started to notice that some of them look a bit odd…
At first glance they’re very cute but if you look longer there’s something…weird…
Some of them are impossibly large, standing or sitting in ways that shouldn’t be possible for an object made of yarn and cotton batting.
And many of them are showing things that yarn shouldn’t really be able to do.
Is this one…growing fur?
While many of these images have commenters calling them out as fake, this relies on commenters knowing enough about crochet and generative AI to tell the difference — two subject areas that don’t often have much of an overlapping fanbase, the author excluded.
It’s also clear that the patterns linked often make something not at all like the image. Usually, pattern creators will painstakingly create and test patterns before publishing or selling them. This can entail a long period of trial and error and a significant time commitment. These AI users seem to have bypassed that step and used a generative AI like ChatGPT to create the pattern.
Let’s look at the first image I shared, for example. This Jigglypuff Pokemon pin links to a page on craftsideasdesign.com. At a quick glance, the pattern does not create what’s in the image. For example, the section giving instructions on how to create the ears:
With dark pink yarn, create a magic ring, 6 sc in ring (6 total)
[Sc, inc] around (9 total)
Switch to light pink yarn, sc around (9 total for each round) 4–5. Sc around (9 total for each round). FO, leaving a long tail for sewing
While anyone with experience in crochet can read this and see it makes something, it does not make the ears in the image. The most obvious issue is that these instructions make circles, not triangles.
In the ‘Eyes’ section, it calls for only two colours — there are clearly three colours in the image. It also says to sew in the ‘glare’, when in the image it appears to be using felt circles. The ‘Hair Tuft’ section does seem to create a long chain which could, if you have enough experience and craftiness, be made into something like the image, but it doesn’t give any indication as to how. There’s a section to make a ‘Ribbon’ which doesn’t appear in the image at all, and there is no instruction on how to create the arms. It’s pretty clear the image and instructions are unrelated.
This is just one of the patterns described, although none of the others I looked at with linked patterns seemed to match their images.
So what’s the harm?
There isn’t any really, apart from it being quite annoying. For example, if I’m looking for a dog amigurumi crochet pattern to create a cute crochet dog plushie I have to first wade through a number of fake patterns. If I lacked a lot of crochet knowledge and the knowledge to spot the fake image I might waste a bit of time and money trying to create something which would end up looking nothing like the image. This is a particular issues as a lot of crochet enthusiasts tend to be older and may lack an understanding of how generative AI and LLMs can be used.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using ChatGPT or other LLMs to generate crochet patterns, but in the examples I gave there was no disclosure that it had been used. There was however quite a lot of advertising on the website, which means the authors are probably making a bit of money from those who click through to the pattern.
It’s certainly a concern that these patterns may end up being sold on Etsy or other craft-selling platforms to unsuspecting buyers. If that was the case, it would require clarity from those platforms about what AI-generated content can and can’t be sold, and whether it needs special tags or indicators so users know what they’re buying.
So what can I do?
Many platforms are now requiring that users disclose when their posts are AI-generated, and have started tagging those posts. This can help inexperienced users to identify the images and avoid being tricked into buying something misleading or incorrect. Generative AI is still developing, and is prone to making mistakes or providing false information. These scams are going to get progressively trickier to spot as the technology advances, and platforms will need to form policies and procedures for dealing with them based on the risk and possible issues it could cause.
Until then, a few pointers for how to spot these. I always hope that it would become obvious to anyone after a little investigation that these images are fake, but I also have elderly and less tech-savvy relatives who I know could fall for this sort of scam. Feel free to pass these along to the crochet-Pinterest-enthusiast in your life:
- Look out for objects in the background — are there any strange artefacts, is the perspective slightly off, does a table have legs of 3 different widths or is there a bizarre, impossible wall-hanging?
- Ask yourself — can the materials being shown be used in the way that’s displayed? As I mentioned, some of these have yarn doing things that yarn just doesn’t do, defying gravity and growing fur to name a few examples.
- If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Patterns take a long time to develop and test — would they really be giving this away for free? If it’s being sold to you, see if you can find reviews or user photos to verify that you’re getting what you pay for. Scammers always rely on you wanting to believe something more than you want to be sceptical of it.
- Stay sceptical — take more than a few seconds to inspect something before you click ‘share’. We are all responsible for stopping the spread of fake or edited images.
Thanks for taking the time to read to the end. This is the first in this series and I’ll be looking for other AI grifts to investigate, so please let me know if you stumble upon anything interesting or subscribe to see what else I find.
If you’re an author of these kinds of images and posts, I’d love to hear your perspective. No hard feelings, it’s all in good fun and I won’t be reporting you to the Pinterest police :)
