A lot of people are quietly worried AI is going to kill creativity. Rightly so, and maybe they are right. If every marketer is using the same tools, trained on the same internet, optimised against the same algorithms, we’re heading towards a world where everything starts looking exactly the same, writes Annabelle Jones, co-founder and chief of brand, experience and partnerships, Rumblings, and director of We Scout.
In fact, you can already see it happening. Look at skincare marketing right now (sorry team, but it’s true). The same pastel palettes, the same dewy close-ups, the same “get ready with me” videos, the same founder storytelling, the same influencer trips pretending not to be influencer trips. Swap half the logos out and most people wouldn’t notice.
The problem is marketing has slowly optimised originality out of itself, and AI risks pouring fuel on that fire.
Most AI today is ultimately a consensus machine. It learns patterns, it predicts what’s statistically likely to perform, you feed it sameness and it gives you sameness back, just faster, cheaper and at industrial scale. But let’s face it, fast sameness is still sameness.
Recently at the Blackbird Sunrise conference, I watched Jae Lubberink the growth manager at online health company Eucalyptus speak about AI and culture, and honestly, parts of it were deeply depressing. He talked about how the sensibility of the software era has already spread into art, branding, writing, film and fashion, creating a monoculture that is slowly killing originality.
One line particularly stuck with me: “We mistake AI as the drawbridge when really it’s the flood. AI is the disease dressed as the cure.” And to be honest, I think there’s truth in that.
If AI simply becomes a machine for producing more content, more optimisation and more statistical averages of what already exists, then yes, creativity is absolutely killed.
I also however think there’s another version of this story. AI doesn’t create sameness, it accelerates whatever the user brings to it. Used lazily, it accelerates beige (absolutely no doubt). Used well, it creates space for deeper thinking, more knowledge, better instincts and more original ideas. What if AI becomes the thing that gives creatives time back, removing operational drag, repetitive tasks, endless production cycles and low-value admin. What if the role of AI isn’t to replace human thinking, but to create more space for it.
That’s where I think the industry is standing at a fork in the road. One path uses AI to flood the internet with more content, more optimisation, more trend-chasing, more safe ideas engineered for engagement.
The other uses AI to create better thinking, it challenges you, it makes you more curious, it gives you more perspective and gives you more time to develop a strong and interesting point of view.
Because the real value in marketing is no longer going to sit with whoever can produce the most content, AI has already commoditised production, the value will sit with the people who think differently, have a strong opinion and cultural intuition. The creative winners will be the people not willing to lean into the gravitational pull of sameness.
And honestly, that’s exactly why we built Rumblings, not to generate more noise, not to flood the market with more average content, but to help marketers think better.
We’ve partnered with creatives, strategists, journalists, data scientists and one of the former AI leads from Woolworths Group because we genuinely believe the future advantage won’t come from who can produce the most, but rather who can spot shifts first and understand (deeply understand) why that matters and what they should do.
AI can surface signals earlier, it can reduce operational load, it can help humans move faster, but it still cannot manufacture a genuinely interesting perspective. That part is still deeply human and ironically, the more AI-generated content floods our worlds, the more valuable human creativity becomes.
In the AI era, there’s absolutely no doubt the last creative standing wins. But they’ll be the ones using AI to remove the drag, automate the grunt work, and create more space for original thinking. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, this is the moment creatives get to truly reign again and I’m here for that.
Written by Annabelle Jones, co-founder and chief of brand, experience and partnerships, Rumblings, and director of We Scout.
