I traveled through several countries this past month. What caught my attention was not the usual diversity each region has. It was exactly the opposite. It was the pattern. Specifically when it comes to the design of advertising pieces. It seems like every ad I see was made by the same hand. Every presentation has the same tone. Every image follows the same visual logic. I raised this with some creative agencies here, and they confirmed what I had already been observing in Brazil: AI is creating a canned world. And often the one asking for it is the advertiser itself, who wants volume and to be present across multiple channels at the same time.
This is not paranoia. It is math. It is trading quality for quantity. Trading the strategic for the operational, and in that trade, Artificial Intelligence has a significant advantage.
Want proof? A study published in December 2025 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, conducted by Kibum Moon, Adam Green, and Kostadin Kushlev, analyzed 2,200 college admission essays. They compared texts written by humans with texts generated by GPT-4. The conclusion was direct: each additional essay written by a human contributes more new ideas than each essay generated by AI. And the more essays you analyze, the more pronounced the difference becomes. Even when researchers try to adjust parameters and prompts to improve diversity, the pattern persists. AI is not creating diversity. It is creating convergence and standardization.
The same phenomenon is happening in music, with consequences that go far beyond what most people notice.
A white paper published by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto, with researchers from Oxford, Wisconsin, Google, and Toronto, mapped what recommendation algorithms are doing to global musical culture. The conclusion is stark: when AI systems multiply billions of recommendations, they affect the nature of individual cultural experiences cumulatively, over time, across populations, regions, and entire cultures. The researchers call this "an unprecedented degree of automated intervention in the way people and communities encounter and experience culture."
In plain terms: the algorithm decides what you listen to. And what you listen to shapes what you think is good. And what you think is good shapes what artists produce. It is a cycle that closes in on itself, narrowing the space for cultural diversity with every turn.
Independent artists are the first to feel it. The study documents how AI begins to displace the work of musicians when used by platforms to generate soundtracks for television and film, turning intermediaries into creators and rights owners. The music business has become a data business. The streaming platform is a data broker. And music, which should be the product, has become a pretext for collecting user behavior.
I am a partner in an OOH media outlet, and I see this happening in real time in the advertising market. The artwork that comes in for approval increasingly looks like it came out of the same factory. The media study, the target audience, the residual message, reach, frequency, all of that which should guide creative work is being replaced by a single line of thinking: volume of pieces and formats. The faster, the better. The cheaper, the better. The more standardized, the better.
But those of us who have been in this market long enough know: it was never about quantity. It has always been about quality and impact.
The question no one has answered for me yet is: where will critical thinking die first?
Here in Europe, especially in Portugal and Spain, I notice a stronger resistance to this. Creative agencies still question the indiscriminate use of AI. But advertisers are demanding the use of AI, even without knowing whether it is the best path. There are still conversations about authenticity, about what differentiates one brand from another.
The European AI Act, which came into force in 2024, is already beginning to create a regulatory environment that requires platforms to be more transparent about how their algorithms operate. But it is a resistance that is weakening. Because the pressure for productivity is global. And generative AI is cheaper and faster.
Over time, can AI evolve and generate more diverse content? Or will we become more standardized with each passing day as we use it for everything? My bet is that we will continue to become increasingly canned. Because the problem is not AI. It is how we are using AI. We are using it to replace thinking. Not to amplify thinking.
Professor Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, from the University of Barcelona, published in 2026 a conclusion that summarizes the current state well: "Generative AI models are still far from replicating independent creative processes." And research shows that AI-generated content is consistently judged as inferior to human-created content, even when comparable in technical quality. Why? Because emotional resonance is missing. Contextual nuance is missing. The mark of the creator is missing.
Will advertising suffer this same problem? Or will it still be the last to bend to this canned standard?
I think advertising will hold out a bit longer than other areas. Because advertising is about persuasion. And persuasion is about connection. And connection is about humanity. But the resistance will last only as long as there are agencies willing to charge for quality rather than quantity. And fewer agencies are willing to do that with each passing day.
What concerns me is not AI. It is the speed at which we are giving up what sets us apart. The critical eye. The capacity to question. The courage to create something that does not follow the pattern. Because when you use AI for everything, you are using a system that was trained on everything that has already been created. You are creating from the past. Never from the future. That, to me, sums it all up. AI does predictive data work very well, but the unexpected, the never-before-created, is still not its territory.
The Toronto study on music I mentioned leaves a sentence that applies to any creative field: "Personalization is seductive. It seems to effortlessly provide more of what you want. But if we believe in notions of shared and public culture, an ever-narrowing space of 'what I want' may need to be punctuated by other experiences, other perspectives, other voices."
And the future, by definition, cannot be canned.
Article originally published on GazzConecta.
