My 14-year-old daughter gave me a 10-minute rundown last night on how tired she is of “AI.”
Honestly, I think she’s just bored by the lack of diversity in the outputs from her elders’ fascination with their new toys.
Her teachers are using AI to help with lesson plans. Adults are using it for presentations, ads, social posts, videos, graphics, emails, and just about everything else we can figure out how to shove into a prompt box.
And a lot of us are learning these tools at roughly the same time.
So, unsurprisingly, a lot of what we make looks and feels the same.
My daughter sees her teachers’ work, but she also sees the broader internet. She sees ads, videos, school assignments, graphics, presentations, and social posts being created by people using many of the same tools in many of the same ways.
She has a wider sight line than any individual creator does.
So she notices the commonalities.
The phrasing. The structure. The visual styles. The transitions. The rhythms. The weirdly enthusiastic punctuation. The suspiciously tidy lists.
And she starts identifying those patterns as AI.
Sometimes she’s right.
Sometimes she’s absolutely not.
The kids — and plenty of adults online — say, “That’s AI,” about everything now, especially when things look similar.
Someone uses a common phrasing? Must be AI.
A familiar illustration style? AI.
A certain kind of video editing? AI.
My daughter is there. Everything is AI, and she is over all of it.
We saw some shitty Photoshopped food art one day.
“That’s AI!”
Uh, no. That’s just shitty Photoshop, an “art form” that has been around nearly as long as personal computers, darling.
But her reaction is more interesting to me than whether she correctly identified the tool.
She’s exhausted by it because, as she put it, “nothing is genuine; it all feels so fake.”
She told me she likes her English Language Arts class because they’re reading classics, and at least those aren’t AI.
That one stuck with me.
Because I don’t think what she’s experiencing is really AI fatigue.
I think it’s sameness fatigue.
We’ve always gone through cycles like this.
A style becomes popular. People imitate it. Advertising adopts it. Got Milk?
Designers adopt it. How many versions of Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” stencil portrait of Obama are people going to make?
Movies adopt it. Action movies where the running and gunning end up pausing for a calm elevator ride? It happened in The Blues Brothers in 1980, in the Honourable Richard J. Daley Plaza.
Websites adopt it. Parallax, anyone?
Eventually, the style becomes so common that people get tired of looking at it, something else comes along, and the cycle starts again.
AI didn’t invent that. Boring-ass humans did.
What AI has done is dramatically increase the speed and scale at which it can happen.
These tools are incredibly accessible. Millions of people can suddenly create competent illustrations, copy, ads, videos, presentations, music, and other media using many of the same models, templates, prompts, defaults, and techniques.
That accessibility is a genuinely good thing.
People can create things they could never have made before. Someone who can’t draw can communicate an idea visually. Someone who struggles to write can get help finding the words. A tiny business can make something that previously would have required an agency.
And we will get diversity from all of this.
People will get better at using the tools. New styles will emerge. Models will become more varied. People will combine techniques in strange and interesting ways. Eventually, AI will probably become less of a recognizable aesthetic and more of an invisible part of the creative process.
But right now, accessibility is also compressing the sameness cycle.
Instead of a creative trend taking years to spread through advertising, media, design, and popular culture, a recognizable style can appear everywhere almost overnight.
Everyone gets access to the new toy at once.
Everyone pushes the same buttons.
Everyone discovers the same tricks.
And then everyone else gets sick of seeing those tricks.
Earlier, I was watching a video of a guy explaining some exercises another creator had put out, and half the comments were people saying they thought the original video was AI because of how it had been edited.
Maybe it was.
Maybe it wasn’t.
At some point, that almost becomes beside the point.
People have seen enough things that look like that that they’ve created a mental category for it:
“That looks like AI.”
And once a style becomes associated with AI, people can start rejecting the style itself regardless of whether AI was actually involved.
Social media accelerates this even further.
We aren’t just experiencing sameness faster than ever before.
We’re teaching each other to recognize it.
Someone posts, “This is obviously AI.”
Thousands of people see it.
Then they start noticing the same characteristics elsewhere.
They point them out to someone else.
Now millions of people are collectively learning the tells — real or imagined — of AI-generated content.
And we’re teaching that pattern recognition to a wider audience, faster than ever before, including a younger and more impressionable audience that spends an enormous amount of time consuming media online.
That means the pushback arrives faster.
Harder.
Louder.
And younger.
A generation doesn’t have to spend 15 years watching a design trend slowly get beaten to death before deciding it’s boring anymore.
They can watch us do it in six months.
That’s the part I think businesses, creators, educators, and anyone else fascinated with these new toys should be paying attention to.
The danger isn’t necessarily that people hate AI.
The danger is that they get bored.
If your advertisement looks like every other AI-assisted advertisement, your lesson plan reads like every other AI-assisted lesson plan, your LinkedIn post sounds like every other AI-assisted LinkedIn post, or your video feels like every other AI-assisted video, people may not care whether you actually used AI.
They recognize the pattern.
And they’re already tired of it.
There are probably going to be real monetary repercussions for people and companies that don’t figure out how to balance the efficiency of these tools with originality, taste, diversity, and an actual point of view.
AI makes creating things dramatically easier.
That also means it makes creating the same things dramatically easier.
And the generation growing up surrounded by all of this may become exceptionally good at noticing the difference.
They’re seeing the patterns.
They’re getting bored with the patterns.
And increasingly, they’re rejecting them.