Stop for a second and take a look at the websites you visit, the commercials you watch, the social posts filling up your feed and the endless parade of content being thrown at you from every direction.

Now tell me, does everything look and sound the same, or is it just my AI-magination? I’m talking about a phenomenon that seems to be creeping into just about everything we see, hear and experience. Where somewhere along the way we collectively decided that the safest path to creativity was to make sure everything looked familiar.

Walk into a store and look at the shelves, particularly in categories where branding used to be loud, colorful and wonderfully weird. Now you’ll see a sea of muted colors, minimalist labels and packaging that looks like it was designed to sit beautifully on an Instagram feed. Which I suppose is nice, but sometimes I want a package to jump off the shelf and yell, “hey, look at me, I’m the one you want!”

We have become incredibly good at identifying what works and replicating it until what once felt fresh becomes the new formula.

The marketing world is especially guilty of this, because we have more data than ever before telling us what people clicked, what they watched, what they bought, what they ignored and how long they stayed on a page. This is useful information, but there is a danger in believing that because we can measure something, we can therefore create something great by simply optimizing every measurable part of it. Creativity doesn’t always work that way.

Sometimes the thing that works best is the thing nobody saw coming.

We now have an incredibly powerful tool capable of helping us create almost anything we can imagine, or at least describe, and that is exciting, but it also raises a pretty interesting question.

What happens when everybody has access to the same incredibly powerful creative tool?

If we all use AI to generate our headlines, write our social posts, create out images, develop our concepts and polish our messaging, we could end up with an enormous amount of content that is technically good and completely forgettable.

If we use AI to avoid having an idea in the first place, then we’re in trouble. Because creativity has never been about having access to the biggest toolbox, it’s about knowing what to build with it.

We seem to have developed an obsession with making everything polished before we make it interesting. Everything needs to be “on brand,” “consistent,” “optimized,” “scalable,” and somewhere in that process we occasionally forget that the things people remember are often the things that don’t fit neatly into the template.

Think about the brands you genuinely love, the advertisements you still remember years later, the products that made you stop and look, the packaging that made you laugh. Chances are, something about them made a choice.

A choice to have a personality.

A choice to say something in a way nobody else was saying it.

That doesn’t mean every brand needs to become outrageous, every website needs to be covered in neon, or every product needs to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes subtlety is exactly the right answer, but there should be a reason behind the choice beyond, “well, everybody else is doing it.” Because if everybody else is doing it, maybe that’s precisely the reason not to.

So here’s my plea to the creative universe. Whether you’re a designer, writer, marketer, architect, product developer, filmmaker, photographer, entrepreneur or just someone with original ideas.

Keep the original idea. Don’t immediately kill it because it doesn’t sound like the last five ideas you saw.

Try the color nobody picked.

Write the headline that doesn’t sound like a corporate press release.

Design the thing that stops and makes people think.

And by all means, use every tool available to you, but don’t let the tools convince you that the goal is simply to make more stuff. The goal should be to make something worth noticing.

So, can somebody paaaahhleezzzz give me a shout?

Where in the world has all the creativity gone?

Or maybe it’s still out there somewhere, buried beneath the algorithms, templates, trend reports and perfectly optimized AI-generated content just waiting for somebody to dig it out and give it another shot.