Design & Strategy
When AI Generates Everything We All Start to Look the Same
AI can improve design and accelerate production. But when everyone uses the same tools, the same prompts and the same references, professional-looking content can quickly become invisible.
The AI era of design has begun. This is no longer a prediction or something waiting for us in the future. Every day, we are exposed to content created with artificial intelligence - on social media, websites, digital and television advertising, video, printed materials and almost every other communication channel.
Let me be clear from the start: I have nothing against AI.
On the contrary, we use it too. I support its development and believe it can bring real value to designers, agencies and brands. But like any other tool, AI can improve a good idea or accelerate the production of something that was never properly considered in the first place. The problem is not AI itself. The problem begins when everyone uses the same tool in the same way and expects to get something different.
AI has given many small brands a major upgrade
For many smaller businesses, AI represents a genuine improvement. A large number of these brands previously had no defined visual communication. Their posters were made in Word, their posts contained little more than plain text, and their photography and advertising followed no consistent system. They did not have the budget for an agency or a person dedicated to managing the brand. Today, AI tools allow them to create something relatively quickly that looks organised, clear and visually connected to their business.
The result may not be original, but it is often a significant step forward from what they had before. And that is a good thing. For more established brands with a strategy, a recognisable identity and a defined way of communicating, AI offers a different kind of value. It can accelerate production, help teams explore more directions, produce more formats and adapt existing materials for different channels.
When there is a strong foundation, AI can make a good system faster and more efficient. When that foundation does not exist, AI usually produces more generic content at greater speed.
A walk through Vodice
I started thinking more seriously about this problem during a stay in Vodice, a coastal town in Croatia. I was walking through a place where tourism is the main industry. Restaurants, excursions, market stalls, apartments, boats, ice cream shops and tourist offers all compete for the attention of people moving along the same street. At almost every other stand, I noticed an AI-generated visual. Outside many restaurants were images of food with that recognisable AI appearance. Some were blurry and obviously unnatural. Others were done quite well. In a few cases, it was clear that AI had produced the initial idea and someone had developed the design further.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Many of these businesses probably had no serious design before. AI allowed them to present their offer more attractively. Instead of a sheet of paper with plain text, they now have an illustration, a composition, a colour palette and something that looks like an advertisement at first glance. But as you continue down the street and look at dozens of similar visuals, another problem appears. Everything begins to look the same. The same contrasts. The same dramatic lighting. The same excessively perfect photography. The same fonts. The same facial expressions. The same sense that the image looks impressive but has no particular story behind it.
When every stand looks visually spectacular, none of them feels spectacular anymore.
When everything attracts attention nothing holds it
Visual communication should help people notice, understand and remember something. Without a clear creative direction, AI often achieves only the first of those goals. It produces an image that catches the eye for a moment but gives us no reason to remember who was speaking to us. When brands use similar tools, similar prompts and similar references, their results naturally begin to converge. A model works with patterns learned from enormous amounts of existing content. If we ask it for a modern luxury hotel, a premium wellness centre or an elegant private clinic, it will give us a statistically convincing interpretation of those concepts. It will probably also give us something very similar to what many other users received from a similar request. That is why so many hotels use the same neutral tones, wellness brands use the same images of stone, water and leaves, and healthcare organisations use the same white interiors, blue details and perfectly lit, smiling doctors.
The result may look professional. But professional and distinctive are not the same thing.
People may not be able to explain it but they feel the difference
In my experience, people are gradually becoming better at recognising certain qualities of AI-generated content. They may not always be certain that something was generated, and they may not be able to explain exactly what feels wrong. Still, they often sense that the content lacks authenticity. For some people, AI content creates a negative reaction. Others are completely indifferent to it. What I see much less often is the knowledge that AI was used increasing the perceived value of the content by itself. This does not mean that a customer will automatically reject a brand because it used artificial intelligence. Decisions are not based on a single visual. But trust is built through a sequence of small interactions, and a sense of genericness can weaken the overall perception of a brand.
This is especially important in service industries, where a customer cannot fully evaluate what they are buying in advance. A hotel, clinic, wellness centre or consultancy is effectively selling a promise of a future experience. Research into responses to AI advertising is nuanced. The conclusion is not simply that AI is good or bad. However, experiments in service advertising indicate that disclosing the use of AI can, in some situations, reduce trust and lead to less positive attitudes towards an advertisement. The effect is especially sensitive when AI replaces the human elements of a service rather than being used selectively as a production tool.
In other words, where and how we use AI matters.
The risk also applies to brands working with designers
Generic output is not only a problem for people who open an AI tool and type a single sentence. Brands should also pay attention when working with designers or agencies that have significantly accelerated their workflow with AI. A designer may be technically excellent and skilled with the latest tools, but if speed becomes more important than understanding the problem, the work will gradually lose its distinctiveness. Previously, it took time to research the subject, develop a concept, find or produce the right photography and carefully build the composition. Today, ten visuals can be produced in a matter of minutes. That is a major advantage - provided we know what we are looking for. Otherwise, we have simply produced ten versions of the same average idea ten times faster. For a serious brand, the question should not be: Does our agency use AI? A better question is: What does our agency do before it starts using AI?
A good result does not begin with a prompt
AI is often presented as a simple process: describe what you need, let the model create the visual, and the job is done. It can work that way. But that is also how we end up with something we have already seen in ten other places.
A good result does not begin with a prompt. It begins with understanding the problem.
Who is the brand speaking to?
How does it want to be perceived?
What is the competition already doing?
Which visual conventions dominate the category?
Which conventions should we keep for clarity, and which should we deliberately avoid?
What emotion do we want to create?
How will the visual fit into the wider communication system?
How will the audience know that the content belongs to this particular brand?
Only then do prompts, references, generation and selection come into play. AI can offer hundreds of possibilities, but it cannot decide on its own which possibility makes sense for a specific business problem. That decision still requires context, strategy, judgement and responsibility.
A design system before automation
I believe brands will use AI to create a large part of their everyday content in the future. That seems entirely logical to me. But for that process to work, a strong design system must come first. A brand needs defined principles, typography, colours, composition, photographic direction, tone of voice and clear examples of what does and does not belong to its visual language. AI can then be used within those boundaries to produce new formats and materials. In that situation, the tool does not reinvent the identity every time. It helps apply an identity that has already been considered across more formats and touchpoints. That is a major difference. One approach is to ask: Create a luxury advertisement for a hotel. Another is to give the AI original photography, a defined concept, a recognisable composition, clear brand rules, precise context and references that do not come from the same generic visual world.
AI is not a substitute for an idea
I do not believe people will choose companies based only on whether they use AI. Nor do I believe every AI-generated visual will cause a negative reaction.
But I do believe audiences will become increasingly sensitive to generic content.
As the volume of automatically generated content grows, quality will no longer depend on who has access to the tool. Everyone will have access. The difference will come from how people think, the quality of the input, the creative decisions they make and the system behind the final result. AI can create a beautiful image. It can accelerate the process. It can help us explore ideas that we previously would not have had the time or budget to develop. But it cannot decide on its own why a particular brand should look the way it does. When everyone uses the same shortcuts, everyone begins arriving at the same destination. The greatest opportunity of the AI era may therefore not be producing even more content. It may be knowing more clearly what we want to say and why anyone should remember it.
Source
Grigsby, J. L. et al. Service ads in the era of generative AI: Disclosures, trust, and intangibility. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2025.