Cosmos, the hit Pinterest alternative, is still deciding what AI should be for

For professionals looking to moodboard, but sick of juggling Instagram lists and Pinterest boards, Cosmos arrived in 2023 to woo millions of users in an otherwise crowded market. 

With a pared-back design, and an algorithm trained on a carefully seeded list of creatives, it topped the Design category in the App Store, and the company reports it’s now used by creative teams at companies including Nike, Apple, and Amazon, who snag over 10 million pieces of content a month from across the internet for their collections.

This growth has been enough to raise a $15 million Series A from Matrix Partners, GV, Accel, and Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, as the company considers monetization strategies ranging from its premium subscriptions to an upcoming e-commerce play. The platform, despite launching much like Pinterest, will soon be a home for creative portfolios, more like how designers use Instagram and Behance.

But as founder Andy McCune charts the company’s future, he’s openly wrestling with the right ways to employ the latest AI technologies to support the creative community—even as a sizable chunk of the community says they don’t want it at all.

When to use AI, and when not to

Generative AI, of course, is still as controversial as it is inevitable—while creatives I speak to are adopting it en masse as part of their own process, there’s a most certain ick factor among the public to the current wave of AI marketing and the rise of the catchall word of 2025: AI slop.

“It’s very morally and ethically important to me to create a platform that champions the artists and the creatives,” says McCune. “Now, does that mean that we’re going to be a company that says, ‘AI-generated imagery does not have a place here’? That’s not a line that I want to draw.”

Currently, Cosmos uses machine learning models to identify what it considers high-quality imagery that would appeal to its users’ tastes, airing that into their feeds. It also uses AI to track and automatically label image provenance. Whereas Instagram is so often a context-less smash-and-grab of other people’s work, Cosmos systems scour the web to figure out what film that compelling frame came from or who took that photo, and tag it appropriately. 

The company also offers a setting, much like Pinterest, allowing creatives to blur or block all AI content in their feeds. Cosmos shares that 10% of all users have actually opted to block AI content—which was higher than they originally anticipated. Very few people customize the settings in any app already, and Cosmos has done nothing to promote that the setting even exists.

“It was definitely surprising to me,” says McCune. “And now we’re having some conversations around like, should that [setting] actually be in the onboarding?”

At the same time, blocking AI is not a setting he wants to apply by default, even if it would be a way to distinguish Cosmos from its peers. When the setting first launched, it blurred people’s AI content—and that was enough to give its users whiplash. 

“All of a sudden, they went back into their mood boards, and they saw a bunch of their images that they had saved in the past get blurred out. And they’re like, ‘Wait, I didn’t know that I was saving AI images.’ And that was frustrating to them,” McCune notes. “They’re like, ‘I feel like I’ve been tricked,’ right? I think for the end consumer, it’s really important that you have a decision in that process of being able to choose what you see.”

Why not just block AI?

A big reason that McCune doesn’t want to block AI-generated content is that he knows some users want it, and more generally speaking, the design industry at his core will be using more AI tools into the future. Especially as he pivots Cosmos away from mere moodboarding to become someone’s own creative portfolio, he realizes that blocking AI generated work would block their voices—and their potentially cutting-edge experimentation.

“I think [AI] will be one medium that people use to express themselves, just like you know, painting is one and digital photography is one, and graphic design is another,” says McCune. “I think it’s important for us if we really want to be a home for creatives to not pick and choose what mediums we think are holy or not.”

And yet, there are lines around AI that McCune won’t cross because they feel off-mission, and somehow, at odds with his own creative community.

“I will say that there is a very easy path for us to take right now, which we have not taken, which is to bring Gen AI into the forefront of the product,” says McCune. “We could have very quickly and very easily built a multibillion-dollar company, if you could just right-click on any image on Cosmos right now and prompt on top of that thing. That’s something that we have not done, because that is not the company that we want to build.”

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