As AI becomes embedded in everyday marketing workflows more than ever, brands have never had more creative power at their fingertips. But according to CEO of generative AI experience agency Time Under Tension, Jason Ross, it’s resulting in businesses becoming lazy and using AI without strategy or human direction behind it.
Ross has been working with VistaPrint on research into how Australian SMBs are adopting AI in branding and marketing.
Together, they found while nearly half of SMBs are already using AI, confidence remains surprisingly low, with only 43 per cent saying they felt comfortable going to market with AI-only branding.
“These are very low numbers,” Ross said. “They probably couldn’t articulate exactly why they weren’t comfortable, but they knew something felt off.”
“They knew they hadn’t invested a lot of time into producing it.”
For Ross, the issue is not access to the technology itself, but how businesses are often using it – or more specifically, how little effort many were putting into the process.
The rise of ‘lazy prompting’
Ross described “lazy prompting” as the habit of giving AI minimal instructions and expecting polished, original creative work in return.
“A lazy prompt is when you haven’t done all of those things and you’ve just asked it,” he said.
“It’s not just lazy prompting, it’s lazy use of AI.”
“If you are staying in ChatGPT, asking for an idea, and then an image, don’t be surprised when everything starts to look the same.”
According to Ross, many brands are still treating AI tools like one-stop creative engines, expecting them to generate ideas, copy, visuals and finish creative assets without supplying meaningful context or strategic direction.
Ross argued that large language models “naturally produce average outputs because they are trained on the average of the internet itself”.
“These AI’s have a particular way of working that sort of average out creativity,” he said.
“If I ask AI to summarise 10 documents, it’s incredible at that, but when I ask it to create something original, its version of good is usually the average of everything it has already seen.”
That, he argued, was why so many AI-generated campaigns, visuals and brand messages were beginning to feel interchangeable.
“If every burger shop types in ‘young family eating a burger, smiling, enjoying themselves,’ they’re all going to end up with something that looks very similar,” Ross said.
“And that’s the challenge for brands now, they need to be asking ‘How do I create something that stands out?'”
The issue he said, is the lazy prompting is resulting in what the industry calls AI slop – a term used to describe low-effort, generic AI-generated content that lacks originality, refinement or human oversight.
“That’s where the new Wikipedia entry for AI slop comes in,” Ross said. “AI slop is that term for stuff that you don’t work very hard for, and AI just produces it.”
“Then don’t be surprised when every other business is releasing exactly the same type of content.”
Why brands are struggling to stand out
Ross argued one of the biggest mistakes brands are making is failing to provide enough context to the tools they were using.
“If I ask it to write copy without any context about my brand, my products, what I did last year, it might just repeat the campaign from last week,” he said.
“The more context you can give an AI, the better job it can do for you.”
“That’s actually where the human effort comes in.”
“You need to spend time investing in it, explaining to it, so that it can deliver above average results.”
He argued many businesses are unknowingly outsourcing strategic thinking to the AI itself, then becoming frustrated when the outputs lack originality or authenticity.
Ross also believes too many brands were relying on a single AI platform – usually ChatGPT – to do everything, rather than building more advanced workflows using specialised creative tools.
“The creative toolset is much bigger than ChatGPT or Claude,” he said.
“There are better tools than ChatGPT for creativity.”
“One of the emerging workflows is to give AI 100 different briefs and see 100 different outputs.”
“Then you go through a selection process to refine the best ones.”
That process, he argued, was where genuine differentiation now happened.
The real competitive advantage is ‘AI fluency’
Ross argued that the brands succeeding with AI are not necessarily the ones with the most tools, but the ones putting the most thought into how they use them.
“It’s the how that matters,” he said. “Not the tool.”
“You need to get better at making the AI work harder for you and your brand.”
For Ross, the real competitive advantage emerging in the market is what he describes as “AI fluency” – understanding how to guide AI properly, structure workflows, refine outputs and push beyond generic first drafts.
He warned that brands relying on quick prompts and instant outputs risk becoming “increasingly indistinguishable from competitors”.
“If you stay in one place, you’re not pushing boundaries,” he said. “And if many others are doing the same thing, that’s why everything starts to sound the same.”
Ultimately, Ross believes AI is now replacing creativity, but exposing how much effort creativity actually requires.
“Creativity takes time,” he said. “You can’t be creative in two seconds.”
