AI doesn't make your marketing original. It makes it average, faster.
- Maciej Konarzewski
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
A client asked me a question on a call last month that I answered too quickly
"If everyone's using the same AI, won't everything just end up looking the same?"
I said something like "only if you use it lazily" and moved on to the next agenda item. It was a decent answer. It wasn't the real one. The real one has been rattling around my head since, so here it is properly.
Yes. It will. Unless you do the one thing most businesses skip.
Average by design
Here's the thing nobody selling AI tools puts on the landing page. These systems are averaging machines. That's not an insult, it's the mechanism. They've absorbed millions of websites, posts, and adverts, and when you ask for "a professional homepage for a plumber," they give you the statistical middle of everything they've seen.
The middle. Of everything. That's what a generic prompt gets you, every single time, no matter which tool you pick.
AI doesn't make your work original. It makes it average, faster.
Two years ago, average marketing at least took effort, so there was less of it. Now average is instant and free, which means the world is filling up with it at a speed we've never seen before. Every feed, every search result, every inbox.
And not just the digital ones. I got a taste of it in the physical world over the holidays.
Driving into a mountain resort in Poland, billboard after billboard, different companies, and I couldn't tell one from another. Same AI-generated images, same copy, same calls to action, tiny icons and dense text nobody could possibly read from a moving car. I was an actual customer that week, trying to work out what the offers were, whether one brand was different from another, whether I'd even used any of them before. No chance. Every board might as well have come off the same template, because in a way they all did.
My fourteen-year-old thought it was all perfectly fine. "At least it doesn't look bad." And he's right, which is exactly the problem. Not one of those billboards looked bad.
Average doesn't mean bad. Average means invisible.
Most of the AI content flooding your industry right now is perfectly fine. Competent, clean, grammatical. And your customers scroll straight past it, because fine-and-familiar is precisely what the human brain is built to ignore.
The blame lands in the wrong place
When the campaign sinks without a trace, I watch businesses blame the tool, the platform, the algorithm, the market. "We tried AI content, and it didn't work."
But two businesses can use the same tool and get completely different results, and the difference is never the tool. It's what each one fed it.
Nobody copied anyone.
Everyone just asked for the average, and the average is identical for all of us.
Think about what actually went into the prompt. "Write a post about the benefits of our service." Which service? For whom? Saying what that your competitor wouldn't also say? If the prompt could've been typed by anyone in your industry, the output belongs to everyone in your industry.
The inputs that change the output are exactly the ones no tool can generate: what you believe that the rest of your field doesn't, who precisely you serve, what you refuse to do even though it would be easy money. That's a point of view. It's the one input your competitors can't paste into a prompt.
What we actually feed the machine
I'll use us as the example, because it's the business I can be honest about.
Vision Marketing's entire visual identity is three colours and one typeface. That restraint wasn't suggested by any tool; a tool would've offered us gradients and a secondary palette, because that's the average. But because those rules exist and are written down, every fast AI-produced asset still comes out looking unmistakably like us. The machine executes inside a system it didn't design.
Same with words. Before we draft anything, for us or for a client, we write down the one opinion the piece argues. One line. If we can't write that line, the piece doesn't get made, because a piece with no opinion is just occupancy of space. This article's line was sitting in a note for a week before any drafting happened.
And the raw material never comes from the tool. It comes from discovery calls, from the words customers actually use, from what we've watched work and fail on real projects. The AI speeds up the shaping. It contributes none of the substance. I've written before about how speed is a systems advantage in SEO, and the same logic applies here: the tooling multiplies whatever you put in. Put in a position, get your marketing. Put in nothing, get everyone's.
Standing out just got cheaper
Here's the contrarian bit, and the reason I'm not remotely gloomy about any of this.
Everyone frames the AI flood as making it harder to stand out. I think the opposite is happening. When every competitor's output converges on the same polished average, the bar for being distinctive drops through the floor. One clear opinion, stated plainly, now cuts through noise that used to require a serious media budget to beat.
It's never been easier to sound like everyone else. Which means it's never been cheaper to sound like yourself.
This matters beyond your feed, by the way. Distinctive, opinionated content is also what gets a business cited by AI search, because the answer engines have no reason to quote the hundredth restatement of the average.
The businesses that will win the next few years aren't the ones producing the most content. Machines have made that contest pointless. They're the ones who know what they think, say it consistently, and let the machines handle the typing.
If you look at your own marketing and honestly can't find the opinion in it, that's worth a conversation. Drop us a line and we'll help you dig it out.
Why does AI-generated content all sound the same?
Because the tools are averaging machines. They produce the statistical middle of everything they've seen, so a generic prompt returns the same generic output for every business that types it. The output only becomes distinctive when the input is: your audience, your language, your point of view.
Should I stop using AI for my marketing?
No. The tools are excellent at production: drafting, reformatting, resizing, speeding up the shaping of ideas. The mistake isn't using AI, it's asking it to supply the thinking as well as the typing. Decide the message yourself, then let the machine execute it.
How do I make AI content sound like my brand?
Write your rules down first. A defined voice, a fixed visual system, and the specific words your customers use. Feed those into every prompt and check every output against them. Without written rules, the tool defaults to the average, because the average is all it knows.
What is a marketing point of view and how do I find mine?
It's the opinion your business is prepared to stand behind: what you believe your industry gets wrong, who you're for, and what you refuse to do. You find it in the work, not in a brainstorm. Look at the advice you give clients that surprises them. That's usually it.
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