Building Great Brands in a World of AI Slop

Great brands have never been built by accident.

Strip away the tools of the moment and the fundamentals are remarkably consistent. Strong brands know who they're for. They understand the role they play in people's lives. They make deliberate choices about how they show up — what they say, what they don't, and where they draw the line. Brand positioning is respected and adhered to. Craft is applied with intent, not decoration.

It comes down to structure, and it's the same structure we keep coming back to at UntilNow: understand why you exist, define what makes you different, and express yourself in a way that's consistent with both. When those fundamentals are clear, brands earn coherence. When they aren't, no amount of output compensates.

AI Was Supposed to Be the Copilot

The promise was compelling. AI would handle the grunt work — the first drafts, the format variations, the production overhead — so humans could focus on the thinking, the judgement, the creative leaps that machines can't make.

In practice, something else has happened.

Efficiency and cost-saving have quickly overshadowed craft. Speed has been mistaken for progress. AI's role has drifted from supporting human judgement to quietly replacing it — often in the places that matter most. Strategy decks written faster but not better. Brand platforms generated in minutes with no real tension behind them. Visual systems spun up without a single difficult conversation. Content pipelines filled simply because they can be.

The Convergence Problem

Large language models and generative AI systems work by recombining what already exists. Publicly available work. Familiar structures. Dominant aesthetics. They're excellent at producing something that feels adjacent to what's already out there — and they sound remarkably confident while doing it.

At scale, this has real consequences for brand identity. Language converges. Visual styles repeat. Brand expressions collapse into a narrow band of acceptability. You end up with a new generation of brand content that looks fine and sounds fine, but says very little.

Not because teams lack talent. Because the path of least resistance has become dangerously smooth.

Where does this lead? To a landscape where brand differentiation is increasingly rare. Different logos, same tone. Different taglines, same ideas. A race to push more content at lower cost — quietly undermining the very thing branding is supposed to protect: clarity, distinction, belief.

The Proof Is Already Here

We've seen what happens when judgement is removed from the loop.

Sports Illustrated damaged its credibility by presenting AI-generated writers as real journalists. Levi's faced backlash after announcing plans to use AI-generated models. Coca-Cola's AI-assisted Christmas campaign split audiences — technically impressive to some, but emotionally hollow to others. Not exactly the brief for a Christmas ad.

In every case, the technology worked as designed. The failure was editorial. Strategic. Creative. Human.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

There's a subtler issue that rarely gets discussed. LLMs are inherently agreeable. They don't argue. They don't challenge lazy thinking. They don't push back on half-formed ideas or tell you something shouldn't exist.

They're optimised to please — and in branding, people-pleasing is a fast path to mediocrity.

The old line goes: be hated or adored, but never ignored. That's getting harder to live by when every brand sounds like it was written by the same obliging assistant. When your brand strategy is built on consensus with a machine, you end up with something that offends nobody and moves nobody.

What You Can Actually Do About It

None of this means AI has no place in brand work. It does. But the role matters.

Stop letting AI do the thinking. Use it to explore, to prototype, to pressure-test — but not to decide. The moment you hand over strategic choices to a system that optimises for plausibility over truth, you lose the thing that makes your brand yours.

Look for inspiration outside the dataset. The best brand strategy comes from places generative models can't easily reach: lived experience, cultural tension, subcultures, human contradiction. If your creative inputs are the same inputs every other team is feeding into the same tools, your outputs will converge. That's not a risk — it's a certainty.

Push for ideas that feel uncomfortable. The concepts that exclude a little, provoke a little, or polarise slightly are often the ones that create real brand positioning. Comfort and consensus produce wallpaper. If everyone in the room agrees immediately, that's usually a sign you haven't gone far enough.

Apply judgement with intent. Strategically. Creatively. Emotionally. That's the work. It always has been the work — and no tool changes that.

The Real Threat Isn't AI

AI isn't killing great brands. Abdicating responsibility for thinking is.

The brands that will stand out over the next decade won't be the ones that adopted AI fastest. They'll be the ones that kept human judgement at the centre of their creative strategy — who used AI to move faster without letting it flatten what makes them distinct.

Brand consistency isn't about producing more of the same. It's about knowing what you stand for and holding that line, especially when the tools make it easy not to.

That takes conviction. It takes taste. And it takes people who are willing to make the harder call.

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