AI Slop Isn’t the Only Problem. AI Sameness Is.

We're all worried about AI slop. But even the stuff that isn't slop has been made really boring by AI. We are in the midst of an AI-generated sameness crisis driven by us optimizing for personality only on one side of our prompts.

We've all seen it. A high-quality polished graphic attached to a post. Dark background. Rounded corners. Sans serif fonts. A little overloaded on information like an eager 7th grader cramming everything they know on a one-pager. If one person did it, we'd all think "wow", but as it's the 100th version I've seen today, the reaction is, "boring".

If Hollywood only had one director and video editor that went from movie to movie, then a trip to a cinema would be a far less exciting affair. Now, a good proportion of social media creators are using the same art director, and everything is sliding into sameness.

I'm not suggesting everyone using this approach is creating AI-generated slop or not putting in real work. In many cases the exact opposite is true. The problem is that the last mile of the work, using the AI to wrap that creative output in a bow of polish, is removing all personality from the end result.

A platform like LinkedIn is to do with connection. I want to connect with people based on their opinions, their knowledge, and their individual takes on the topics they choose to share about. Often the individual writing and visual style of a person was an important part of that connection which AI sameness loses.

But this isn't limited to LinkedIn. Documents. Slide decks. Those HTML files Copilot is suddenly so good at creating. They all suffer the same issue. That "wow" polish the first time we saw one has now spiraled into a sameness induced yawn.

To help outline my concerns I have created a classic sameness-fueled explainer graphic with ChatGPT. For its part, it understood this aesthetic I was describing without too much prompting. It knows what it's doing!

Want to avoid AI sameness? Focus in on your design approach when prompting your tool. The visual feel of your creations is just as important to your voice as the topics and words you choose. Just as AI is great at creating generic writing without a good prompt, it's equally great at creating generic design too.

What's your take on this? How are you avoiding AI-generated sameness and injecting your personal approach into all elements of the AI outputs you create?

First posted on Linkedin on 08/20/2026 → View Linkedin Post Here