Standing out in the sea of AI sameness
Capability increase isn’t a competitive advantage when it’s ubiquitous.
"Downfall" by Max Klinger, Art Institute of Chicago
Standing out in the sea of AI sameness will be the ultimate challenge to designers and business owners in the next few years.
As AI adoption increases in creative workflows, that output naturally converges toward the average.
We're seeing it with AI-designed flyers that all look like the same shit. We're seeing it with AI-written posts that are so formulaic and generic that nobody cares to engage with them. It's vibe-coded websites that all look like they use the same bootstrap UI kit.
It's everywhere already, and it's making all brands look and sound the same. In one recent study, human-written essays added between 2 and 8 times more diversity than ChatGPT generated ones. The homogenisation effect is only going to compound.
There is a perception gap problem here too. The AI users think they are dramatically upgrading their capabilities. The recipients are cringing at the inauthentic result. There's already studied evidence that people perceive AI-created brand content as less authentic and have negative reactions towards it.
A colleague of mine coined the term "ProSloppers" yesterday. We are seeing people generating slop who think they are pros now, because they can produce output that feels polished and appears professional to the untrained eye. Yet, most of them don't have the domain knowledge to know if the results are actually good, or even know if they are designing/writing/coding the right thing in the first place.
Research consistently finds that the biggest performance gains from AI often go to less-skilled or less-creative people. AI genuinely does make their output better. The problem is that producing better output isn't the same as developing the expertise to know what good is.
Meanwhile, businesses are silently destroying their brands by looking and sounding the same as everyone else. They wonder why they aren't getting cut-through when they have no guts, no strong opinions, no distinctive design identity, no personality in their voice.
There will be a huge swath of businesses who won't engage a designer again. They'll bumble along, ProSlopping everything, and continue praising their massive efficiency boost, never recognising the perception gap.
And they are not wrong. Their capabilities HAVE increased. But so have everyone else’s - using all the same tools and getting the same results. Capability increase isn’t a competitive advantage when it’s ubiquitous.
For the ones who do recognise that the value of design isn't just the output – it's in the thinking – we need to do even better than before to serve those people with creative decisions that constantly push the boundaries of the new "taste". AI compresses the fashion cycle, which means trends will come and go at breakneck speed. AI will learn a fairly good mimicry of "taste" over time.
We need to stay ahead of the curve and innovate the new trends faster than ever before. This means consciously pushing back against the AI's convergence to the middle on every decision. This requires a human in the driver's seat, with AI not more than a research intern. Once AI runs the show, the opportunity for innovation is unlikely, because AI mimics an average of the past.
We are going to see two things happen:
1. Way more boring same-same output that absolutely drowns us in a sea of AI slop. It will be hard to even find the surface to come up for air. Social media and other user-generated, algo-driven content will completely die under this weight.
2. A small percentage of people standing out by doing the exact opposite. Much greater bravery, risk-taking, unique perspective, imperfect expression, and everything else that the public will be desperately craving to connect to a brand in an authentic, human way.
If you’re not in the second group, plan for your obsolescence. Your brand will be drowned out before you’ve even seen the tidal wave coming.
Hi, I'm Benek Lisefski. Since 2001 I've run my own independent design business. Join me as I unfold 20 years of freelance business knowledge: honest advice and practical tips to help you take your indie career from good to great.
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