For professionals trying to moodboard, however sick of juggling Instagram lists and Pinterest boards, Cosmos arrived in 2023 to woo thousands and thousands of customers in an in any other case crowded market.
With a pared-back design, and an algorithm educated on a rigorously seeded listing of creatives, it topped the Design class within the App Retailer, and the corporate studies it’s now utilized by artistic groups at corporations together with Nike, Apple, and Amazon, who snag over 10 million items of content material a month from throughout the web for his or her collections.
This progress has been sufficient to lift a $15 million Collection A from Matrix Companions, GV, Accel, and Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, as the corporate considers monetization methods starting from its premium subscriptions to an upcoming e-commerce play. The platform, regardless of launching very like Pinterest, will quickly be a house for artistic portfolios, extra like how designers use Instagram and Behance.
However as founder Andy McCune charts the corporate’s future, he’s brazenly wrestling with the correct methods to make use of the most recent AI applied sciences to assist the artistic group—at the same time as a large chunk of the group says they don’t need it in any respect.
When to make use of AI, and when to not
Generative AI, in fact, continues to be as controversial as it’s inevitable—whereas creatives I converse to are adopting it en masse as a part of their very own course of, there’s a most sure ick issue among the many public to the current wave of AI marketing and the rise of the catchall phrase of 2025: AI slop.
“It’s very morally and ethically necessary to me to create a platform that champions the artists and the creatives,” says McCune. “Now, does that imply that we’re going to be an organization that claims, ‘AI-generated imagery doesn’t have a spot right here’? That’s not a line that I need to draw.”
At present, Cosmos makes use of machine studying fashions to determine what it considers high-quality imagery that will enchantment to its customers’ tastes, airing that into their feeds. It additionally makes use of AI to trace and robotically label picture provenance. Whereas Instagram is so usually a context-less smash-and-grab of different folks’s work, Cosmos techniques scour the net to determine what movie that compelling body got here from or who took that picture, and tag it appropriately.
The corporate additionally provides a setting, much like Pinterest, permitting creatives to blur or block all AI content material of their feeds. Cosmos shares that 10% of all customers have really opted to dam AI content material—which was increased than they initially anticipated. Only a few folks customise the settings in any app already, and Cosmos has completed nothing to advertise that the setting even exists.
“It was undoubtedly stunning to me,” says McCune. “And now we’re having some conversations round like, ought to that [setting] really be within the onboarding?”
On the similar time, blocking AI is just not a setting he desires to use by default, even when it will be a strategy to distinguish Cosmos from its friends. When the setting first launched, it blurred folks’s AI content material—and that was sufficient to present its customers whiplash.
“Impulsively, they went again into their temper boards, and so they noticed a bunch of their photographs that they’d saved up to now get blurred out. They usually’re like, ‘Wait, I didn’t know that I used to be saving AI photographs.’ And that was irritating to them,” McCune notes. “They’re like, ‘I really feel like I’ve been tricked,’ proper? I believe for the top shopper, it’s actually necessary that you’ve got a choice in that strategy of with the ability to select what you see.”
Why not simply block AI?
An enormous motive that McCune doesn’t need to block AI-generated content material is that he is aware of some customers need it, and extra typically talking, the design trade at his core will probably be utilizing extra AI instruments into the longer term. Particularly as he pivots Cosmos away from mere moodboarding to turn out to be somebody’s personal artistic portfolio, he realizes that blocking AI generated work would block their voices—and their doubtlessly cutting-edge experimentation.
“I believe [AI] will probably be one medium that folks use to precise themselves, identical to you realize, portray is one and digital images is one, and graphic design is one other,” says McCune. “I believe it’s necessary for us if we actually need to be a house for creatives to not choose and select what mediums we predict are holy or not.”
And but, there are strains round AI that McCune gained’t cross as a result of they really feel off-mission, and in some way, at odds together with his personal artistic group.
“I’ll say that there’s a very straightforward path for us to take proper now, which we now have not taken, which is to carry Gen AI into the forefront of the product,” says McCune. “We may have in a short time and really simply constructed a multibillion-dollar firm, in the event you may simply right-click on any picture on Cosmos proper now and immediate on high of that factor. That’s one thing that we now have not completed, as a result of that’s not the corporate that we need to construct.”
