AI didn't create the generic content problem. It made it visible.

Still Life, Giorgio Morandi. Many artists painted bottles and vases. Yet the perspective is unmistakably his.

Earlier in my career, I worked as a designer, paired with a copywriter, producing marketing materials for a range of clients. Every brief looked roughly the same on paper. Same deliverables, same timelines, same process.

But two very different things kept happening.

Some brands made the work feel inevitable. Their position was defined, their point of view was clear. We knew what they stood for, what they'd never say, what they cared about beyond the transaction. The materials we created could only have come from that company. There was nothing else they could have been.

Other brands hadn't done that work. Their brand was a visual style and a tagline, maybe. We'd produce materials that technically looked fine: well-designed, well-written, professional. And completely interchangeable. You could have swapped in any competitor's name and nothing would have felt wrong.

That gap between the two had nothing to do with design or copywriting. The conditions for specificity either existed or they didn't.

For years, though, the gap stayed hidden. The time, the cost, the craft involved in making anything created enough friction to give everything a thin layer of distinctiveness. Even generic thinking looked somewhat particular once a talented team had spent weeks shaping it.

Then AI removed that friction.

And now I see a lot of anxiety from business owners asking how to stand out in a world where everything sounds the same. Consumers are getting sharper at spotting content that feels frictionless: smooth prose that could have come from anyone, about anything, for anyone. That instinct is only going to keep developing. The concern is fair.

But the panic tends to land on the wrong thing. The problem was never the tool.

Because what AI actually did was make visible something that was true all along. Authenticity is about conditions, not content. It shows up when every choice an organization makes (its pricing, its people, its process, its design) comes from the same source. Those choices align, and customers sense coherence before they can name it. You don't inject that quality into a piece of content. It emerges, or it doesn't, from everything an organization has already decided about what it is.

Which means a brand that has genuinely built a point of view, made real decisions about what it stands for and what it refuses to do, cannot be made generic by a content tool. The specificity is too structural for that. And a business that hasn't done that work will produce generic content with any tool. AI makes the absence harder to dress up.

The red flag I look for is a brand that sounds like anyone. Not an underdeveloped visual identity. Not a website that needs refreshing. A brand where the messaging describes a category rather than a company. Where they've articulated what they do, but not what they think, or how they think, or why any of it matters.

One question tends to cut through it: Could only this company have made this?

Not "is this well-written?" Not "is this on-brand?" Those questions can both be answered with a yes by content that is still entirely generic. Could only this company — with this history, these values, this point of view, these specific people behind it — have made this?

If the answer is maybe, the brand hasn't been built yet. What's been built is a style. And styles are borrowed. Brands grow from the inside out.

The organizations cutting through right now aren't louder. They're clearer. Their marketing doesn't explain who they are. It demonstrates it. That clarity comes from decisions made long before the content was written. About what the organization stands for. What it refuses to be. What it implies through every operational choice it makes.

Do that work, and the tool genuinely doesn't matter.