AI was supposed to increase creativity. Any idea you have can come to life with AI. So how did we end up with so much slop? Wasn’t AI supposed to usher in a wave of new ideas? How come literally every website, piece of writing, app, memo, document, statement, billboard, advertisement, looks the same, sounds the same, is the same?
This is an opinion piece, based on my conversations with people, so take it with a grain of salt. From what I hear people say, the reason why everything ends up looking the same when created with AI is because of fear. Fear of standing out and getting it wrong. Which, hey, think back to high school right? Nobody wants to be different. And since AI is trained on humans to start with, it also doesn’t want to be different. So you’ve got a user and a model who both don’t want to be different.
Then there’s the fear of missing something important. What if I don’t include a certain important detail? What if I forget to mention that one thing? So you, and the AI who thinks like you, try to include literally everything. Knowing what not to include is 1000x harder than knowing what TO include, because it requires understanding who your audience is, and what matters to them.
It’s that piece which circles us around to the core problem AI didn’t solve. Understanding what your customer wants and doesn’t want. For every seemingly simple website, product, app, etc. there are so many options you could include. So many features it could have, so many ways it could be used. And people are strapped for time, no one wants to waste their time filtering through to figure out what your product is for or how it can help them get what they want.
But it is hard to know what matters and what doesn’t. Because people can’t just tell you. It’s a process of refinement that they don’t have the time for. So you have to be a second brain and do it for them. But that’s even harder than doing it for yourself. You have to get into their world, see through their eyes, and figure out what truly matters to them.
AI can’t even begin to do that. But it can give you a product that includes everything the person might want, so you don’t miss anything. But the old phrase applies “build for everyone, and no one wants it” because people want things that satisfy their particular situation, their particular needs, their particular set of circumstances.
Unintentionally, this is why all roads lead back to quizzes, because quizzes ask people what they want, what they need, what their circumstances are, and then give a recommendation based on your knowledge as the quiz creator.
But I digress. What I’m trying to say here is that even though the promise of AI was unlimited creativity, we got slop, which by Ernest Hemmingway’s Definition, means you include everything with no refinement. This is what happens when you don’t do the work of figuring out what your customer wants and doesn’t want. Because that part is hard, and takes a long time, and has no certain pathway, so people don’t do it, and let AI try to figure it out, which it can’t, because it also can’t do it, so then you include everything and call it good, and people hate that because they immediately recognize it was not built for them, so they don’t feel a connection to it, and sales are emotional, so if you don’t feel a connection to the thing you won’t buy the thing, so then we have an endless slop cannon met by a brick wall, and that’s the current state of things.
