The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

Light and Shade is a new series exploring the challenges at the heart of the AI-creative conversation. As AI becomes increasingly present across the creative industries, the series examines the opportunities and dilemmas our community grapples with. It is grounded in interviews with technologists, researchers, artists, designers, creative founders, writers, lecturers and environmental and computational experts, offering a fuller view of the many sides of the story of AI’s creative influence.

Déjà-vu is a familiar sensation in graphic design. There is always a popular template, plug-in or feature that becomes trendy, encouraging a flurry of similar-looking work, before the inevitable drop off. For years, these systems have allowed designers to make stylistic leaps quicker, to make sense of partially formed ideas faster. The resulting flatness is merely a side effect of multiple people harnessing the same tools, for the same steps in the design process. Not evil, but inevitable.

AI, like any tool in a designer’s belt which introduces automation, can also increase similarity. The artist, writer and technologist James Bridle likens this to the similarities in the appearance of buildings – a result of the default settings in the design software used by architects. But, unlike the tools designers and architects have used in the past, generative AI tends to nudge us further in the “correct direction”. In fact, it’s often described as a creative collaborator, feeding in personalised responses to your unique creative problem, making its voice just a little louder than your typical digital design tool.

We’ve seen in some initial research studies how this kind of relationship between AI and creative can increase homogenisation. In 2024, an online experiment with 36 ChatGPT users found that use of AI can expand how many creative ideas an individual user has, but at a group level, “users tended to produce less semantically distinct ideas”. That same year, another study reached similar results; this time it was a group of short-story writers who each managed to independently write a “more creative” story by using AI, but produced a narrower scope of novel content overall.

It’s odd: sameness has become a side effect of AI, though it needn’t be. While some tools currently used by designers or illustrators might offer only marginal variations, the range of inputs AI allows for are technically far greater. So long as the tool is steerable enough, and the designer has enough time to explore, AI should increase our capacity for creative expression, not stunt it. The question becomes, how do we ensure our dealings with AI expand our individual creative potential, without flattening our collective richness?

To improve our working relationship with AI, we must first understand how sameness happens. The comic below, created by Jordan Bolton, explores this topic through a single character who, under the weight of everyday pressures, comes face to face with the threat of a great homogenisation. Our hope is that it offers a pause; a chance to consider what tasks are worth templating, and when it’s best to trust our instincts.