I don’t believe that AI has made everyone dishonest; it’s just made it too easy for weak brand systems to produce infinite content that is technically fine and commercially useless. It’s the Industrial Revolution for blandness.
It’s easy to point fingers at the new girl, but I don’t think AI interrupted a golden age of witty, memorable messaging. I do remember years of brands clipping their own wings in the name of consensus and “best practice”. Half the category sounded like it had been written by an anxious middle manager, and, as an anxious middle manager, I’m not impressed. The slop machine was trained on our own beige nonsense, and nobody thought to install a kill switch.
State of Brand pointed to the same problem, noting Barron’s reporting that 73 corporate documents used the same “not just X, it’s Y” construction in a single quarter. That’s what flattening looks like in the wild: a slow, depressing convergence of a handful of techniques until we’re all extras in Branding John Malkovich.
Joe Public is getting savvy to AI filler, and buyers can feel when the content lacks conviction. A 2024 study in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services found that when brands use generative AI to replace humans on social media, perceived brand authenticity drops way down. It also shows that the freefall slows when AI is used to assist humans rather than replace them entirely. NIQ’s research on AI-generated ads found that consumers see them as more annoying than traditional ads. Annoying isn’t a very positive metric.
In the context of brand, and ignoring everything else that is going on in the world right now, the most immediate danger posed by AI is your business becoming professionally forgettable.
A good tool should save you time, but if you saw a builder using a hammer for every task, you would not think, “What an efficient builder.” You would think, “This person is going to fuck up my house.” Using AI for everything from defining your tone of voice to generating your LinkedIn post to marking its own homework just removes humans from the only parts of the process that actually matter. It’s abdication wearing a moustache and pretending to be innovation.
As much as I would love to work on more punky products, a distinctive brand does not need to be shocking for the sake of it. It just needs to feel like a person, or at the very least like a company run by people. You should be able to remove the logo from a headline and still have a decent chance of knowing who said it.
If you can’t do that with your own comms, then you don’t have a brand voice, and you need to have a word with your agency. And while you’re at it, if they never push back on a brief, then ditch them entirely. A decent creative partner should challenge you and always ask why - you want “Yes, and” not a Yes Man.
"This is my moment"
Martine McCutcheon,
1999
Use the tool, but make sure you don’t outsource your judgement to it. In two years (two months?), when your feed is full of competent, forgettable sludge, the brands that still sound like themselves will have a ridiculous advantage.