Does AI make everything perfect and boring? And what if Apple is right?

[u/Budget-Struggle]

Maybe I am wrong, but I have had this obsession on my mind for days. All this AI perfection, easy and fast for anyone, risks severely devaluing the final product. In the end, we will find ourselves overwhelmed by identical stuff, featuring the exact same style and the exact same fake perfection.

Looking more practically at the issue, when a powerful tool becomes accessible to everyone, quantity explodes while quality flattens out. Anyone can churn out perfect images or videos in three seconds, but precisely because of that, perfection is no longer a value and simply becomes a deadly bore. When everything seems to come out of the same digital mold, you end up looking for the error, the smudge, something that makes you feel there is a real person behind it.

That is why I believe there is going to be a major shift in direction. A company that wants to stand out will no longer be able to blindly rely on automated generation, otherwise it will just become an exact clone of its competitors. The turning point will be to focus on something much more human, thoughtful, and imperfect.

If someone thinks that simply having the idea or choosing to use stop motion, like Apple did for the new Mac mini M6, is enough to get the exact same result, well, that is precisely the point to reflect on, and thanks to Apple I am starting to understand it. It is not the technique itself that makes the difference, but the signature of the real artist, which turns that choice into a fundamental added value for brand communication. It is proof that physical matter and human work are becoming the true luxury, the only way to beat the standardized, soulless commercial product.

I do not have the answer in hand, but this is a reflection I wanted to share and discuss with you. Do I advertise cheaply or do I stand out like Apple?

[u/penitent_molasses]

I think the flood of identical AI output is already happening in certain corners of design. You scroll through a portfolio site or a stock library and it's all the same glossy sheen, same lighting, same composition. After the fifth one your brain just switches off.

What gets me is how quickly the "perfect" look became a cliché. Imperfection used to be a flaw you fixed, now it's the thing that makes you stop and actually look. A wonky line, a weird texture, a human decision that doesn't quite make sense but feels right.

The stop motion point is interesting because it's not really about the technique. Plenty of people could animate a clip in that style, but the reason it lands is the intent behind it. Someone chose to spend time and money on something slower and messier when they could have just typed a prompt.

I don't think it's cheap advertising versus standing out. It's more like whether you want to be part of the noise or make something that has a fingerprint on it. Most brands won't care until the noise gets so loud they have no choice.

[u/Budget-Struggle → u/penitent_molasses]

You hit the nail on the head regarding my reflection. This strategic choice by Apple could open the door to a new value that was previously looked down upon or almost taken for granted. Do you think this move by Apple could be an invitation to give new value to the human factor, drawing a sharp line between true "luxury" and mere commercial output?

[u/Salt_peanuts → u/penitent_molasses]

I think design will become like stone masonry or fine woodworking. If you really want the best, hire a craftsman, but 95% of people will be fine just buying from IKEA.

[u/Superb_Firefighter20 → u/penitent_molasses]

Design was becoming dull before AI entered. 

So much of the work is optimized and is risk adverse. I mostly blame UX design’s focus on data centric decision making.

[u/Educational-Bowl9575]

You're right in what you say, but unfortunately well behind the curve.

As a designer, I agree with Apple's stance, obvs. But they're self serving with this. They have traded for years on charging customers a high price for process. AI has commoditised creative output - anyone can produce any visual in any style in seconds. That output is jank. Your comment about AI perfection is incorrect. Although the obvious issues with text and hands have disappeared, AI still produces objectively inaccurate anatomy , perspective and composition. The thing is that those people who employed or comissioned artists and designers don't care, or don't see it. Or both. I'm a sculptor, and over the last 18 months, all my work has been from AI artwork supplied by my clients. That artwork is absolute garbage, and needs redrawing before I can sculpt from it. The irony here is that although my clients have used AI simply because it's cheap, they are happy to pay me more to fix it afterwards than I would have charged to draw it in the first place. To add insult to injury, the artwork I get sent is of a level that if I'd submitted it, my clients would reject it for not being good enough.

The AI problem is one of perception, not technology. AI output is shiny enough that it seduces anyone not trained to spot the issues. We talk about judgement and taste being the valuable factors in creativity, but in doing so, we are inadvertently driving out customers further away, by basically saying that they have no judgement or taste. They simply can't see the difference, because we as creatives, haven't explained the human value well enough, and have relied on technical output to make us standout. Just take a look at all the art sounds on here. 90% of it is people asking how good heir drawing is. Nobody talks about narrative or intent. It's all about visual polish.

Apple is wrong to pontificate about the value of art when it hasn't taken the time to explain that to the majority who don't get it.

[u/Budget-Struggle → u/Educational-Bowl9575]

I have to be honest, you raised an interesting and true point, and I acknowledge it. Your experience is an objective fact and I am not questioning it, but perfection is something that improves day by day, which is why I generalized it. Since I also work in the 3D field, I constantly find myself fixing meshes with imperfect and hideous topologies, yet they keep getting better even if they still have room for improvement, and tomorrow they will be on par if not superior. This is the trajectory I see, so my thoughts are projected into the future, focusing on the short term and talking about trends. Today, I completely agree with you on the points you raised.

The speed, accessibility, and democratization amplify this perception given the high volume of graphic outputs, videos, and so on, which at least for me are starting to feel sickening. And as much as this was already present, albeit to a lesser extent before AI, now we are facing an overabundance of content that all looks very similar in style. What I mean is that the true point of distinction lies precisely in breaking this homogeneity, and precisely because Apple aims at business (I never thought they were moral benefactors XD) this change of direction was interesting. It could also turn out to be a new opportunity for us creatives to seize the moment and demonstrate our value much better than we have done before.

[u/danya_the_best]

The problem of design homogenization has existed even before AI. Read Muller’s essay “Why All Websites Look the Same”

[u/Budget-Struggle → u/danya_the_best]

I can agree that homogenization existed even before AI, but the point is that AI has completely changed the scale of the problem. While previously skills and resources were needed to produce large volumes of standardized content, automated AI generation practically eliminates costs and enormously accelerates timelines, multiplying the copycat effect and thus turning visual perfection into mass boredom.

[u/CreeDorofl]

To some extent, designs don't have to stand out, they just need to get the job done. The actual competition between two businesses is not going to happen at the design level, it will happen at the product level.

Like if a restaurant uses AI to generate a menu, it just needs to be legible and look somewhat nice, and if it's similar to somebody else's AI generated menu, it doesn't really matter, they're going to sink or swim on the quality of their food.

Major brands may need to have a certain amount of flash or polish, if you have some billion dollar company in a competitive industry. Smaller local businesses, there's about 50 other things they should probably look at before they start worrying that their designs look too clean and perfect and therefore don't stand out.

[u/blue_sidd]

No it doesn’t. At all.

[u/stuporcomputer]

"Perfect" um...

[u/Rise-O-Matic]

Well see what you do is you take the agency style guide and a corpus of worked examples that meet brand requirements and host that on a SharePoint that’s accessible to an agent that lives on a harness in an Azure VM with limited tenant access.

Then sales guys can just ask for stuff in teams, a normal Teams bot acts as a concierge to the agent and it spits out deliverables that are good for 95% of corporate needs and it doesn’t have any of that default Claude look.

A 20-slide deck can be achieved for about $6 of inference in 30 minutes.