Springboards, an AI platform for advertising and marketing teams has launched a new “divergence model”, Flint, designed to break what it calls the growing problem of AI-generated sameness across advertising and creative industries.
The launch comes amid increasing concern within the creative industry that mainstream large language models are converging on overly similar outputs, limiting originality in strategic and ideation work.
Springboards co-founder and CEO Pip Bingemann said the industry had reached a point where “smarter, faster, more polished” models were paradoxically producing more repetitive ideas.
“We never set out to become a model company,” Bingemann said. “We set out to help people have better ideas. But it became impossible to ignore that frontier models were converging into sameness. For strategy, writing, and creative thinking, that’s a bug – not a feature.”
A ‘divergence model’ built for creative variety
Flint has been developed as a lightweight, fine-tuned model built on an open-source foundation. Unlike conventional large language models optimised for accuracy and consistency, Springboards says Flint is engineered to increase “entropy” in outputs – surfacing a wider spread of ideas rather than converging on the most statistically likely response.
Chief Technology Officer Kieran Browne said the system was designed to intervene at “critical tokens” in model generation, deliberately encouraging divergent pathways in how ideas are formed.
“Rather than increasing randomness uniformly, we target the moments where a model chooses a direction,” Browne said. “That allows us to increase variation without degrading performance on non-creative tasks.”
Springboards claims internal benchmarking shows Flint significantly outperforms leading LLMs on creative diversity metrics, scoring 7/10 on its Novelty Bench compared to an average of 2.88 for mainstream models. The company says this reflects Flint’s ability to produce functionally distinct outputs across repeated prompts.
Challenging the industry’s push toward convergence
Bingemann argued that dominant AI providers—including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic—have optimised their models for correctness and reliability, unintentionally narrowing their creative range.
“In those worlds, you want accuracy and predictability,” he said. “But for creatives, convergence kills originality. We’ve built Flint for the opposite problem.”
Springboards’ leadership also said concerns about hallucinations in earlier models led to overcorrection, with creative variability sacrificed in favour of safety and consistency.
Platform relaunch expands access and workflows
The Flint release is part of a broader relaunch of the Springboards platform, which now features a redesigned interface, expanded workflow tools, and a new tiered pricing model including free access and a $30 monthly subscription plan.
The updated platform integrates multiple leading AI models alongside Flint, allowing users to switch between systems or use automated routing depending on task type. It also introduces collaborative “canvas” tools for ideation, allowing teams to move between chat-based exploration and structured creative development workflows such as briefs, storyboards and campaign concepts.
Co-founder Amy Tucker said the platform was now opening access beyond enterprise agency customers.
“From freelancers to global teams, the goal is to let more people explore better thinking, not just bigger organisations,” Tucker said.
Training and industry integration
Alongside the platform, Springboards is launching Spark Sessions, a monthly masterclass series featuring industry figures including Mark Pollard, James Hurman, Tom Morton, Lucy Verby, Faris Yakob, Rosie Yakob and Zoe Scaman.
The sessions are designed to combine creative craft training with emerging AI workflows, reinforcing Springboards’ positioning as both a tooling and education platform for marketers and strategists.
Investor Blackbird said the move reflects a broader shift in AI toward domain-specific systems rather than general-purpose models.
“Creativity is one of the hardest domains to crack,” said Blackbird partner Thomas Humphrey. “Springboards understands the craft from the inside. Flint isn’t decoration—it’s the core engine of the product.”
Springboards says Flint will not replace existing models in its system but complement them, ensuring users can choose between optimisation and divergence depending on the task.
“We optimise for variation, not automation,” Bingemann said. “Human taste is still the centre of great creative work. We’re just giving it better raw material.”
Flint is available globally from today.
