Sameness as a Service
AI-induced blandness is upon us. Here's what communicators must do about it.
I have a feeling of déja vu at least once a day on LinkedIn: it feels like I read the same post multiple times in my feed. Not literally the same post, but the same cadence, structure, and optimistic-yet-hollow tone.
We all know the beats. The unnecessarily dramatic opening ("I never thought a conversation with a barista would change my perspective on leadership...") followed by perfectly formatted bullet points, brought home with a conclusion that somehow ties a mundane observation back to broader Business Wisdom with all the narrative grace of a freight train.
LinkedIn was never exactly a hotbed of creative expression to begin with. But this wave of AI-generated sameness isn't just a LinkedIn problem. What we're seeing is indicative of a broader acceleration toward derivative creativity that has profound implications for anyone whose job involves communicating ideas, building brands, or capturing attention.
The Economics of Bland
There's a concept from cultural theorist Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future”—the idea that we gradually stopped imagining genuinely novel possibilities and instead got stuck in an endless loop of slightly remixed versions of what already exists. Fisher was writing about music and culture more broadly, but he nailed something profound: innovation had become incremental, creativity had become derivative.
Fisher died in 2017, so he didn’t live long enough to see the Cambrian explosion of LLMs and AI tools. But supposing he were still with us, he would no doubt revisit his work to swap “slow” for “fast” in light of recent developments.
Every piece of AI-generated content is, by definition, derivative. It's a high-probability response based on patterns in training data, which means it's optimized to produce something that sounds like everything else that came before it. When we feed AI tools prompts asking for “engaging social media content” or “thought leadership pieces,” we get back exactly what we'd expect: content that matches the statistical center of what "engaging" and "thought leadership" have looked like historically.
This isn't the slow drift toward sameness that Fisher observed. This is sameness at scale. Sameness as a Service, if you will.
The mechanism driving this isn't mysterious. AI content tools are relatively cheap (at least for the end-users, not necessarily the companies providing them), fast, and “good enough” for most purposes. If you're a busy marketing manager who needs to populate a content calendar, ChatGPT can crank out months of posts in an afternoon. If you're a comms person who needs to draft three different versions of a product announcement for different audiences, Claude can handle that a minute.
The economic incentives for this are clear: why pay for human creativity when AI can deliver something serviceable, maybe even pretty good, for pennies? And why take a risk on the unexpected when you can guarantee consistency and sufficient quality? Sure enough, agencies and in-house marketing teams are seeing an infinite horizon of nails to hit with their new hammer.
Passable is Invisible
But here's what that logic misses: adequate is becoming invisible. The same way marketers talked about “banner blindness” in the 2000s and 2010s as online advertising proliferated across the web is how I predict most people in the industry will be talking about AI-generated content as soon as the end of this year.
The stuff that actually cuts through isn't the smooth, optimized, perfectly formatted content. It's the weird, imperfect stuff that makes you stop scrolling because it surprised you.
We're entering an era where genuine human creativity isn't just valuable, it's the only thing that's actually visible.
Think about your favorite brand or corporate communications in the last year. Probably not the ones that read like they were generated by “Write me a press release about our new product launch in a professional but approachable tone.” More likely the ones that took a genuine risk, said something unexpected, or approached a familiar topic from an angle no one saw coming. Not being contrarian for its own sake, but recognizing that in a world drowning in predictable content, unpredictability becomes the ultimate competitive advantage.
What We Do About It
For communications professionals, this shift creates both a threat and an enormous opportunity.
The threat is obvious: if your job consists mainly of producing “good enough” content at scale, AI can already do that better and cheaper than you can. Press releases that hit all the standard beats, social posts that check all the engagement boxes, internal memos that convey information without ruffling feathers. That work is gone. You just may not know it yet.
The opportunity is subtler but more significant. Companies and agencies that recognize the premium on genuine creativity will pay well for it, and it will become more evident that true creative spark is rare. The brands that cut through the noise won't be the ones with the most content or the most polished content. They'll be the ones with the most interesting content.
This means rethinking what must be optimized for. Instead of efficiency and consistency, we should optimize for surprise and authenticity. Instead of following best practices, we must deliberately and selectively break them. We might still ask what other companies do in a given situation, but do so as a means of guiding ourselves in the other direction.
It also means getting comfortable with imperfection. AI content tends toward a kind of uncanny valley of smoothness, grammatically perfect but somehow lifeless, without verve. Human content, at its best, has edges, voice, and the productive messiness that comes from actual people thinking actual thoughts (something ironically missing from most “thought leadership” even in the pre-AI epoch).
None of this is inevitable. We're not destined for a future of bland content just because AI makes it easy and cheap to produce. The tools exist, but how we use them is up to us.
We can use AI as a shortcut to mediocrity, cranking out content that meets minimum requirements and calling it a day. Or we can use it as a collaborator in creating something genuinely new, using it to handle the repetitive tasks so we can focus on the creative ones, or using it to generate raw material that we then shape into something unexpected.
In a world where anyone can generate a perfectly passable LinkedIn post about leadership lessons learned from their morning coffee, the real question becomes: what can you create that no one else, most of all a machine, would think to create?
That's where the future of communications lives. Not in the fast cancellation of creativity, but in its fierce protection.