Everyone uses the same AI, so everyone sounds the same.
AI makes each piece better and every brand more alike. Buyers notice before your dashboard does.
The finding that should worry every marketing team
In a peer-reviewed study in Science Advances, Doshi and Hauser found AI help made individual stories more creative while making the stories collectively more similar. Each piece improves and the whole market converges. Ahrefs found 74.2% of newly published pages now contain AI-generated content.
Why nothing warns you
There is no penalty that fires, no alert, no drop on the day it happens. Quality scores go up. What falls is the chance a machine or a buyer can tell you apart, and that only shows up later as fewer mentions and slower pipeline.
The dangerous kind of generic
The obvious kind is easy to spot. The expensive kind reads as specific and still says what everyone else says: correct facts, no point of view. It passes human review comfortably, which is exactly why it survives to publication.
What we do about it
Before anything ships, we measure how close it sits to the default version a model would write for that brief and to what your category already says, and whether it carries a claim only you can make with proof attached. Work that is not distinctly yours does not go out under your name. Consumers are already discounting the average: Kantar found 43% do not trust AI-generated ads.
Everything we have written on this
- The Sea of Sameness: How AI Is Flattening Every Brand
- Why Every Brand Is Starting to Sound the Same
- Why Does ChatGPT Sound Generic?
- Specific-Sounding, But Still Generic
- The Nine Tells of AI-Generic Writing
- How to Make AI Writing Sound Like Your Brand (and Why Prompting Fails)
- Why Voice Can't Be Prompted
- How to Acquire a Voice in the Agentic World
- Perplexity and Burstiness: The Real Reason AI Writing Is Detectable
- AI Detectors Measure the Wrong Thing
- Distinctive Brand Assets When AI Writes Everyone's Content
- Distinctiveness Is the Cause; Share of Voice Is the Symptom
- The Brand Distinctiveness Index, Explained
- What Is Distinctiveness Engineering?
- The Logo Test: Strip the Logo. Can a Machine Still Tell It's You?
- The State of Sameness: Dubai Real Estate, Measured
- The Homogenisation of Thought, Not Text
- What an Octopus Can't Do
Questions
Isn't a brand voice guide enough?
A voice guide makes output consistent. Consistent and generic is a real combination, and the common one. The question is not whether it sounds like you, but whether it is distinguishable from the default answer and from your category.
Do you detect AI writing?
No. Who or what typed it is not the point, and those tools measure the wrong thing. We measure distance from the average, which is what decides whether you get chosen.
Does this slow production down?
It refuses some drafts, which is the point. Work that adds nothing is worse than no work, because it adds to the sameness the engines average over.