AI Makes Everything Look the Same. Here’s How True Experts Stand Out

From politics and public policy to entertainment, AI adoption is at an all-time high. 

Most working Americans use it at work, and it is especially prevalent in industries like marketing and advertising. More than 80 percent of advertising executives say their company deploys AI in the creative process, up from 60 percent in 2024, according to data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Soon, it will be near 100 percent.

On the one hand, AI prevalence means greater productivity. On the other, if used hastily or sloppily, it quickly threatens creativity. 

If you’re a producer or everyday consumer, you’ve probably noticed. You’re scrolling through Instagram or going about life, and every graphic or poster kind of looks the same. A hair salon’s services. A dog adoption event. A rave’s promo poster. They all have the same tidy composition, the same icons, the same clean little rhythm in the copy and fonts. You may have seen 100 of these graphics in a single week, and you probably couldn’t describe a single one.

I’m not an AI skeptic. I adopted these tools early, I still use them and I think the enthusiasm is earned. The problem isn’t the technology; it is how quickly brands have come to lean on them without giving it much more thought.

We can go from a brief to something postable in an afternoon, and most clients will sign off without a note. But there is a trade-off.

By overusing AI and expecting it to just “figure out the rest,” brands are unknowingly moving themselves toward the middle of the pack. Today’s AI tools are impressive, but everything they know, they learned from the enormous pile of work that is already out there. That pile is the well they draw from, so output tends toward the average of what already exists.

The production problem isn’t a bug somebody patches in the next release. It’s the nature of the whole thing. Brands are sacrificing their creativity for productivity, their quality for quantity and consumers are feeling the pain. Whether it’s a new political ad or a cooking commercial, 60 percent of U.S. consumers are now turned off by the word “AI” in brand messaging. If they can sense it, the chances of disengagement go up.

For producers, the trouble starts when the job is to stand out because average is exactly the wrong target. A brand earns attention by not looking like the stuff around it. Ask a model for that, and we will get something competent and familiar, but that isn’t the same as memorable. When the goal is to make an impact with your organization’s digital content and online presence, name ID is everything. The last thing you want to be is the brand nobody recognizes and nobody remembers. 

AI almost never gives work that is obviously broken. We receive work that is plausible and just slightly off: copy that reads fine, but sounds like nobody; lighting that looks like a stock photo; a cadence no human has ever actually used out loud. Sixty pieces of creative like this over a cycle and the brand loses its voice, and nobody can point to the day it went missing.

Catching that and maintaining what makes a brand distinct takes two things. Those producing content have to notice that something is off, and they have to know how to fix it. Most people can sense the first. The second is craft, which still takes years to build.

Even then, all of that is damage control. And damage control is the least interesting thing a talented creative does.

Think about what happens when every shop in the business is pulling from tools that aim for the middle. Everybody’s feed starts to rhyme. A voter scrolling past nine spots that all feel the same will stop on the 10th one that doesn’t. The crowd became more uniform, so the odd one out receives more attention than before.

Daring to be different is where the best creatives aim, and it is much harder than it looks. The hard part is knowing which unexpected idea is the one that actually works for this particular race, at this exact time, in this specific medium—and there is (still) no tool that can help.

Then, we have to get the ad, the social media post, the creation approved. There is always a safer version, and it is the one nobody has to defend. In our business, you’re either recognizable or you’re background noise. No model is going to decide which one you are.

Now that everyone has AI, talent is the only thing left for competition. Take the speed these tools give you and spend it on being original, not more of the same. Creatives who think outside the AI middle will make any brand unmistakable.

Bonnie Hansley serves as Vice President of Production at Push Digital Group.