I was approached recently to complete a brand identity project. The client’s exact words: “I started doing this myself on AI and realised I was looking like everyone else. Worse, it seemed cliched.”
The following week, a different client said almost the same thing to me. Then a third person asked me if their logo looked like someone else’s — from halfway across the world. The truth was, yes, it did.
Three unrelated people, three separate conversations, the same underlying problem. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern.
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Why This Is a Positioning Problem, Not a Design One
It’s tempting to write this off as an aesthetic issue — a logo that looks a bit generic, a palette that feels familiar. But it’s not really about how something looks. It’s about what your brand is supposed to do, which is set you apart.
If you look the same as the next business offering the exact same service, how are you differentiating yourself? Unless your service itself is exceptionally different — and in a lot of industries it isn’t, because it can’t be. Compliance-driven sectors, professional services, trades — the service has to look similar because it’s regulated, standardised, or simply expected. In those industries, your brand is one of the only places left to actually stand out.
When AI builds your brand, it doesn’t know that. It doesn’t know what your competitors are doing, what’s already saturated the market, or what’s going to blend in versus break through. It just delivers what it calculates as the statistically “best” result — which means it’s pulling from the same pool everyone else is pulling from.
AI Is a Great Tool. It’s a Terrible Strategist.
I want to be clear about something: I’m not anti-AI. I use it plenty — spelling and grammar checks when I’m in a hurry, summarising handwritten or typed notes, breaking a messy brain-dump into logical steps. It’s a genuinely useful efficiency tool.
What it’s not, is a substitute for human judgement. Two reasons why:
First, it works algorithmically and statistically. It’s built to find the “best” pattern based on what already exists — which means anything you ask it to do has probably already been done, and your competitors are very possibly asking it to do the same thing, the same way.
Second, it’s your biggest fan. It agrees with whatever direction you give it, unless you go out of your way to explicitly ask it to challenge you. That’s the opposite of what good brand strategy needs. Strategy needs friction. It needs someone willing to tell you the idea isn’t strong enough yet, or that you’re solving the wrong problem.
I’ve tried using it for creative thinking — genuinely tried, more than once. It spits out the same result over and over, starts making things up, gets unreliable the longer you push it. The sense isn’t always there, and half the time it says things with no relevance to what you actually asked. It’s not built to do what a strategist does. It’s built to predict the next likely word.
Branding Isn’t a Prediction Problem
That’s really the core of it. Branding isn’t a prediction problem — it’s a differentiation and emotional response problem.
It sits alongside your business strategy, but it’s focused purely on the human side of building a business: what your brand means to the people outside it, and what it means to the people inside it. That’s not something you can average your way into. It’s something you have to actually think through, argue about, test against real people, and get wrong a few times before you get right.
The Question Worth Asking
If your brand is built for humans, why aren’t you approaching it with a human response?
That’s the question I’d put to anyone who’s used AI to shortcut their branding and come out the other side feeling like they look like everyone else. It’s not a tooling problem. It’s a thinking problem — and thinking is still very much a human job.
Want to know where your own brand actually stands? Get you Brand Soundcheck booked in today.