If you’ve started to notice your hometown being flooded with near-identical posters, you’re not imagining it. In any one day, you could spot the same cluttered design advertising the local Christmas fair, a gym class, a nail studio, and a dog grooming service. Yes, AI might seem like a life saver for small businesses that are looking to get their services out there without paying a designer to mock up a flyer, but it’s a trap.
Eventually these posters will fail to grab attention at all. People will become so used to seeing that exact layout and font, they’ll start to zone it out. And if it’s happening to posters, then surely the same will apply to all AI-generated ‘creative works’: books, scripts, prints.
It’s all to do with how these tools are modelled. The more data that is input into AI models, the more similar the outputs will become. Averaging.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Let’s hone in on books as an example. Thinking back to before the dawn of artificial intelligence, how many times did you read a book and think that the plot felt awfully familiar, even though you’ve not read it before? At least once, right? I have probably read eight books with ‘wife’ in the title, alone. If human brains are coming up with suspiciously similar ideas without conversing with one another, think about how much worse it could be with the involvement of our new tools that are designed to spit out ‘average’ results.
I’m writing a book at the moment (well, actually, I’m writing a few books), and one thing I am doing to ensure that my ideas remain original is staying away from AI. Completely. I haven’t — and won’t — put a single sentence, idea, character (the list continues) through any AI tool. For me, it’s not difficult. I literally come up with ideas in my sleep (if you know, you know). The temptation to use it to clean up a paragraph, or to find alternative ways to say something I’ve repeated too much already is there, but the risk of producing work that doesn’t stand out isn’t worth it to me.
Use it or lose it
It’s not impossible to come up with the same concept as someone else at the same time, but it’s far more of a concern if everyone is using AI to generate their ideas. So, if you want to stay original, don’t consult ChatGPT or Claude. As tempting as it may be.
It has only reached widespread use in the past couple of years, but the reliance on artificial intelligence tools has already been associated with declining cognitive function. It’s not that using AI tools directly causes this deficit, but that the dependence on them means that we are engaging our brains less. And just like our biceps, our quads or our abs, our brains need to be exercised.
So, instead of going straight to Gemini next time you want to draft an email, or to ChatGPT for a better headline for your social post, try going without first.
Have you ever had one or two ideas, and then had five more flow in? That’s because your brain works as an associative network. When you focus on one idea and nurture it, you will trigger something called spreading activation, and before long you’ll pull in variations and related concepts.
Personally, I get so many ideas that it’s actually a hinderance. I often find myself partway through a project only to jump ship for another that I dreamed up overnight. It’s taken practice to prioritise them, and I have had to find a way to store most of my ideas away for a rainy day, as I simply I don’t have the time to work on them all (unless I use AI…)
And yes, I do use em dashes. But guess what? They’ve been around much longer than ChatGPT, honey.
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