Artificial Intelligence
AI Is Making Everyone's Ideas the Same
AI makes your work easier. Yet it also makes you sound like everyone else.
Updated October 3, 2026 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- AI is slowly killing human creativity.
- In today's world, you must rely on yourself to come up with great ideas.
- Uniquely human qualities, like humor, empathy, and courage, can help people stand out amidst the AI slop.
If you pull up the last five proposals that landed on your desk, or the last five emails you sent, or that paper you were asked to write about market conditions, they may look slick. They may be polished. They may look focused, organized, and sophisticated.
You may even think that you are getting the hang of all this AI at work. And your confidence may be soaring. Yet something lies just beneath the surface.
Your work has never looked better, and it has never looked more alike. You can’t tell what your work is apart from what someone else’s work is. That’s the thing with AI.
AI makes everything look more or less the same.
My research has led me to a 2024 study in Science Advances: Anil Doshi of University College London and Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter asked 300 people to write short stories.
Some got story ideas from AI, and some did not.
The AI-assisted stories were judged more creative, and the writers who started least creative gained the most.
But here is the kicker: Those stories were also more similar to one another!
Not convinced yet? In a 2026 study in PNAS Nexus, Emily Wenger of Duke University and Yoed Kenett of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology gave standard creativity tests to 22 AI models and more than 100 people.
The results? The models’ answers were far more alike than the people’s were.
Why does this happen? In 1974, legends Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, then at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, showed in Science that the first number we see drags our judgment toward it.
They called it anchoring.
In their watershed experiment, people watched a wheel of fortune stop on a number, then estimated what percentage of United Nations members were African countries. When the wheel stopped on 10, the typical guess was 25 percent. When it stopped on 65, the typical guess was 45 percent.
The first answer “wins,” even when it is random.
Today AI hands millions of us the same first answer. The first anchor. It’s no wonder it drives us to slop and sameness.
But there is hope. Here are three things you can do to keep from conforming to everyone else’s ideas, and soar high above your AI-dependent peers:
1. See a World That Can Be
In my bestseller The Creator Mindset, I write about seeing a world that can be, not a world that is.
AI is built from the world that is. It has read what has already been written, and it hands you back the most likely version of it.
That is fine for a routine email.
It is a problem for an idea that is supposed to be yours.
So use this tip: before you open the AI chat window, write your own answer.
Three rough lines will do, and they are allowed to be bad. They should be bad! It’s a low-stakes exercise. Only then bring in AI to enhance your ideas.
Now that you have set the anchor, have the machine work for you, not the other way around.
2. Take a Chance
One of the tools in my new book The Solution Mindset is simple to say and hard to do: Take a chance.
It is hard because the safe choice is usually the one everyone else is making.
Michael Bar-Eli and his colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem analyzed 286 penalty kicks from top soccer leagues in a 2007 study in the Journal of Economic Psychology.
A goalkeeper’s best chance of stopping the kick is to stay in the center of the goal.
Yet goalkeepers rarely do.
They dive left or right because diving is what goalkeepers are expected to do, and it’s exciting, and a penalty-scored goal just seems to hurt more when you simply stand still.
AI’s answer is the dive. Every time. Every way. Dive.
It is the expected move, the one nobody gets blamed for.
So when the options are on the table, ask which one would surprise people.
In this case, stay in the middle. Pick the one that could fail. Then test it small and cheap, so being wrong costs you a day or a week and not a year.
3. Lead With Humor, Empathy, and Courage
Another concept I use often is three traits most people never connect with creativity at work: humor, empathy, and courage.
They are also the three things a machine can’t bring from experience. And people can tell.
In 2025, Matan Rubin and Anat Perry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, along with their colleagues, published nine studies with 6,282 people in Nature Human Behavior.
Participants read identical supportive messages. When they believed a human wrote the message, they rated it as more empathic and more supportive than when they believed AI wrote it.
The words were the same. The value was not.
So before anything leaves your desk, add one thing only you can make.
Handcraft it. Love it. Make it your own.
Maybe it’s a customer’s exact words. A joke or insight that could only come from your team. A position you are willing to defend out loud.
That is what turns the blah into wow.
At the end of the day, AI is making everyone’s creativity the same. Sure, it may look good at first, but the ever-present AI slop of the same results—the same thing over and over—demands that you come up with something different to stand out at work. And the three tools above are sure to give you that edge.
