The Tidal Wave of Banal

Why does so much AI-generated content look the same? Laura Pearman argues the problem isn’t the technology but our creative literacy, and that your own depth of knowledge is now your brand’s greatest advantage.

By Laura Pearman.

Something Shifted in the Feed.

You've noticed it too. The same sage green. The same rounded serif font. The same warm, slightly beige lifestyle photography. The same tone of voice: capable, calm, aspirational. Inoffensive to absolutely everyone and memorable to absolutely no one.

Scroll long enough on any platform and it starts to feel less like content and more like one long, beige corridor. This is what I’ve started calling the Tidal Wave of Banal.

An ever-growing, looming wave of utter boringness. A building wave of flavourlessness that, when it crashes, will flood everything we consider original, colourful, alternative and groundbreaking. Made by machines being briefed by people who lack the creative nuance and literacy to ask better of them.

The Machine Didn’t Do This Alone

Here’s the part that most conversations about AI creative output miss entirely.

The algorithm didn’t decide to make everything look the same. We did.

AI doesn’t generate from thin air. It generates from patterns. From what it’s been trained on. And what it’s been trained on is an internet that has been trend-chasing, algorithm-optimising, and competitor-copying for over a decade.

Garbage aesthetic in. Porridge aesthetic out.

This is not a flaw in the technology. It’s a mirror. And right now, that mirror is reflecting a creative culture that has quietly forgotten how to go to the source with reverence and an open heart.

How We Got Here

Grade-polishing education systems rewarded the correct answer and penalised the unexpected one. Creativity was always the subject you could drop. The one that didn’t count towards the grade that mattered.

Short-term political thinking did the rest. Arts funding cut. Creative subjects squeezed out of schools. Culture treated as a luxury, not infrastructure. The message was consistent across decades and governments: the arts are decorative. They are not serious. They do not produce measurable outcomes.

This is a patriarchal position. Creativity has long been coded as soft, feminine, unmeasurable. The domain of women and dreamers. Neither of whom, historically, were the ones setting the budgets.

The consequence: we trained a generation to be fluent in competence and illiterate in nuance. Then we handed them AI and told them to “have a bash” at being creative.

We Stopped Doing the Reading

The best trends analysts spend time in archives, meandering through galleries, poring over trade fairs and obscure cultural corners that most people don’t even know exist. The ones who see what’s coming before everyone else. They don’t Google “what’s trending 2025” and remix the top five results.

They understand the lineage of ideas.

That lineage is exactly what AI doesn't have. It can recombine. It can riff. But it cannot originate from genuine cultural depth, because no one taught it to read.

And if we’re honest, we haven’t been doing much heavy-lifting reading ourselves. We’ve been duped into thinking we haven’t got enough time. That everything else is way more important and urgent.

Westwood, Fosse, and the Debt to What Came Before

Vivienne Westwood

Vivienne Westwood didn’t sketch from mood boards. She unpicked vintage garments.

She would take apart 17th- and 18th-century garments seam by seam to understand how they were actually constructed. She studied Savile Row tailoring not as an observer but as a student of its underlying logic. She absorbed the geometry of historical corsetry, the cultural weight of tartan, the anti-establishment rage of punk, not as aesthetic references to approximate, but as a creative vocabulary she genuinely understood from the inside out. 

She was also making regular visits to the Wallace Collection in London. Studying François Boucher and Antoine Watteau. 18th-century French Rococo painters whose pastoral scenes, draped silhouettes, and theatrical ornamentation fed directly into the theatricality of her collections. This is not a footnote. It is the whole argument.

Then she made it entirely her own.

The rocking-horse shoe. The elevated punk. The corset worn as outerwear before it became everyone’s Pinterest aesthetic. None of it emerged from trend reports. All of it came from knowing, structurally and historically, exactly what she was breaking and why.

It’s worth noting that she drew from sources the fashion establishment had dismissed as either too old, too working class, or too female. The depth of her research was precisely in the places nobody else was bothering to look.

The result was unmistakeable. Not because it was trend-led. Because it came from somewhere real.

Before she became the designer of Carrie Bradshaw’s most iconic wedding gown, Westwood was being ridiculed and laughed at on live British television. By the host. By the audience. The disbelief was public and unambiguous.

That is the sentiment of groundbreaking. Shock first. Then, eventually, reverence.

Jacko’s Moonwalk

The same principle holds in movement. Watch Bob Fosse performing the Snake in the 1974 film The Little Prince. The slinkiness, the precise isolations, the coiled stillness before a strike. Now watch Michael Jackson’s signature 80s and 90s choreography. The moonwalk, the anti-gravity lean, those sparing, surgical gestures. The lineage is explicit and traceable. Jackson had studied Fosse with the same seriousness Westwood brought to Boucher.

That is not copying. That is how genuinely groundbreaking creative work has always been built: through deep literacy in what came before, followed by the confidence to take it somewhere new.

AI creative output has no Westwood in its archive. No Fosse. It has Pinterest boards.

What the Current Aesthetic Is Telling Us

Look at the visual landscape of 2025 and 2026.

It has a particular quality. No strong colour, no real pattern, no risk. Brands that look like they were designed by committee, briefed by algorithm, and executed by a tool that was asked to “make it feel premium.”

There are exceptions. There always are. But they stand out precisely because they’ve done the work: the creative reading, the referencing, the development of a genuine aesthetic point of view that didn’t come from asking a machine to make something that feels current.

The exceptions understand what Westwood understood. What Athena understood.

Original influence is not loud. It's rooted.

For Your Personal Brand, Specifically

If your personal brand still feels like it could belong to someone else (same palette, same format, same general register of professional warmth), this is worth sitting with. Not because you've done something wrong. But because the bar has shifted.

In a world where AI creative output can produce a polished, inoffensive brand identity in minutes, polished and inoffensive is no longer enough.

The only thing AI cannot replicate is the specific texture of a life lived, studied, and turned into genuine expertise.

That's yours. And it's worth protecting.

The Pinking Shears Reframe

A note before this becomes a polemic against AI: I use it. Many of the smartest people I know use it. But there is a difference between using a tool with a trained eye and using a tool instead of developing one.

Think about pinking shears. A specific, professional cutting tool that produces a clean zigzag edge. In the hands of someone who doesn’t sew, they’re just scissors with unusual teeth. In the hands of someone who understands fabric, grain, and fraying, they’re precise. They serve a purpose. They’re deployed at exactly the right moment.

AI creative tools work the same way

Fed with genuinely specific inputs (a particular reference, a cultural moment, a lineage of thinking you’ve actually absorbed), they can accelerate and expand what you’re doing. They can make someone with deep knowledge faster.

Fed with vague instructions and borrowed references? Banality.

The tool is not the issue. The depth behind the brief is.

Go to the Source First

In practice, it starts with going upstream. Not to trend reports. Not to what your competitors are doing. To the actual sources.

What thinkers, movements, or moments genuinely shaped how you work? What influences sit in your memory that you’ve never consciously connected to your brand?

Your accumulated knowledge, formal or otherwise, is not a background detail. It is part of your brand capital.

Start treating it like one.

A Brief Note on Cost

Generating AI creative output at scale has an environmental cost that most brands aren’t accounting for. Every image generated, every piece of copy produced by a large language model, draws on computational resources that are not free or consequence-free.

The tools are worth using. Use them with intention rather than reflexively.

Quality of brief over quantity of output. Every time.

What Survives the Feed

Athena’s influence didn’t come from volume.

She was the patroness of all arts, crafts, and invention. The original source. The one who understood, before anyone else thought to ask, that creativity without knowledge is just noise.

She didn’t flood Olympus with content. She showed up with something that really mattered, forged from wisdom, clarity, and genuine depth of perspective.

The brands that are cutting through right now share something. They feel like they come from somewhere. There's a specific intelligence behind them. A point of view you couldn't mistake for someone else's.

That’s what deep, specific expertise produces. And it’s what the Tidal Wave of Banal makes more visible, more valuable, and more necessary than ever.

In my next column we’ll go further: the specific human skills that AI actively cannot replicate, and why they happen to be the ones women were told to downplay.

Laura Pearman  is the Founder of LauraPearman.com. She is a Personal Branding Consultant, and  the Host of MwahTV.

Laura is a dedicated Personal Branding Consultant who specialises in helping women craft and develop their personal brands to achieve recognition and success in their respective fields. Drawing on her "Creative Swiss Army Knife" expertise, she empowers female entrepreneurs to harness their unique strengths and creativity, guiding them to build standout brands that leave a lasting impression in the marketplace.

With degrees in Marketing and Photography, combined with over a decade of experience running her creative business and serving hundreds of clients, Laura offers trusted insights and recommendations.

In addition to her consultancy work, Laura writes a thought-provoking column for us here that stimulates important conversation around "The Athena Complex." This concept explores the idea that while we all aspire to be goddesses in our zones of genius, the journey to achieving this is often far more complex than it seems. Laura's article delves into these challenges, encouraging women to embrace their power and navigate the intricacies of personal branding with confidence.