We all know AI doesn’t necessarily have the best PR team.

I’m sure we can all agree that if brought up, nine times out of ten it’s a rant about one of its many problems causing the ever-present feeling of impending doom in our society.

A Pew Research Center survey from September found that 50% of people are more concerned than excited about it. Another poll found that just 2% of respondents fully trust AI to make fair decisions. Two percent. That's essentially a rounding error with anxiety.

The reasons to distrust AI are everywhere: environmental cost, energy consumption, job displacement, the existential dread of not knowing what it might become. And look, babes, I get it.

But while we're busy cataloguing everything wrong with AI, we're missing something more uncomfortable. That is, the idea that we might actually need it.

Why? Because we've already broken our own idea machine.

There's a concept floating around that I can't stop thinking about.

Economist Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues published a paper with the extremely unsubtle title "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" They looked across industries from semiconductors to agriculture and found that we now need vastly more researchers and R&D spending just to maintain the same rate of progress.

Basically, we have to row harder just to stay in the same place.

Anecdotally, I feel this is felt in every cinema showing the ninth sequel to a franchise that peaked in 2004. It's in every brand doing the same Wes Anderson TikTok aesthetic. It's in every "unhinged admin" voice that stopped being funny approximately 47 seconds after it started.

Marketing, advertising, and content have stalled creatively and are now photocopying the same twelve ideas for years and calling it strategy.

We didn't need AI to make everything feel derivative. We did that ourselves.

Because the Remake Economy isn't just evident in Hollywood.

Yeah, film studios keep remaking old properties because they're "proven IP" with "built-in audiences” (also known as risk mitigation dressed up as creative decision-making.)

But advertising has been doing the exact same thing, just with better jargon.

Almost every fkn brand on the planet now wields a minimalist sans-serif logo with a cheeky social media presence.

Every campaign is either nostalgia-baiting or trying to manufacture a "cultural moment" using the exact playbook from the last cultural moment. We've got the same brand archetypes, the same insight frameworks, and the same tone-of-voice guidelines ensuring nobody sounds too different from anyone else.

It’s attack of the clones out here.

It's not that people aren't talented. It's that the system has been designed to sand down anything sharp.

A/B testing rewards incremental improvement. Performance marketing punishes experimentation. And stakeholder sign-off means ten rounds of making something safer, blander, more like what worked before.

We optimised creativity into a corner. And now we're stuck there, remaking the same content over and over with slightly different aesthetics. Talk about glitching out.

AI didn't create the sameness. It just revealed it.

Here's my hot take: if AI can replicate most marketing content convincingly, that's not a statement about how good AI is. It's a statement about how predictable we've become.

The backlash against AI makes sense emotionally. It feels like the final insult, the proof that creativity has been commodified into something a literal machine can do.

But the anger is misdirected.

AI didn't make every brand sound identical. We did that with best practices, proven templates, and an entire industry that somewhere along the line decided to stop taking risks.

The real question isn't whether AI can replace human creativity. It's whether we were actually using human creativity in the first place, or just cycling through the same ideas with better production value.

“Everything is a remix.” Until everything fkn sucks.

Soooo, what if, and like I said, hear me out, AI Is the restart button?

This is the part where I'm supposed to say AI will "unlock" new ideas or "democratise" creativity or some other piece of empty futurism (blegh!). I'm not going to do that, because AI isn't creative. It's a pattern-matching tool that regurgitates what it's been fed.

But here's what I think it might do: remove the excuse.

You can't blame budget anymore. You can't blame timelines. You can't blame lack of resources or headcount or access. If you feed AI a brief and it spits out something indistinguishable from what your team would have made, the bottleneck was never capacity. It was courage, honey.

AI forces the question: if the tool can make "good enough" content in seconds, what does it mean to make something actually good?

Not "performs well in testing" good. Not "on-brand" good. Actually new. Actually interesting. Actually worth someone's attention.

So maybe the best use of AI isn't replacing creativity. Maybe it's making it impossible to hide behind the performance of creativity while doing nothing remotely creative at all.

The test isn’t the tool. It’s what we do with it.

Bloom's research shows we need exponentially more effort just to maintain the same rate of innovation.

That's true in science. It's true in film. And it's devastatingly true in marketing and advertising, where we've been calling iteration "innovation" for so long we've forgotten what the real thing looks like.

AI won't solve that on its own. It's not going to generate brilliant ideas just because we ask it to. But it might create enough pressure, enough discomfort and enough existential panic that we finally stop remaking what worked five years ago and try something actually new.

The irony is that people hate AI because they think it will make everything more homogenous, more soulless, more the same. But I can’t stress enough, that it was us that already did that.

We built an entire industry on templates and proven formats and risk-averse consensus. If AI breaks that, even accidentally, it might be the most useful thing it ever does.