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AI-Generated Homogeneity

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It’s still early days with AI Generation tools. We’re all still learning the potential and limitations.

One watch-out is the bias toward homogeneity — the tendency for AI results to look alike. As AI predicts what to generate, the path of least resistance is an averaging of the content in its source material.

Ian Whitworth once referred to this as “The Great Same-ning”:

“ChatGPT, Jasper and all the rest are powerful conformity machines, giving you the ability to churn out Bible-length material about yourself and your business that’s exactly the same as your competitors.”

A couple months ago, Oxford and Cambridge researchers illustrated the risk of homogeneity in a study of AI Generated content in Nature magazine. The risk increases as AI gets trained not only on human-created content, but on other AI-generated content.

As an example, the researchers studied an AI model trained on images of different breeds of dogs. The source material included a naturally wide variety of dogs (French Bulldogs, Dalmatians, Corgis, Golden Retrievers, etc.). But when asked to generate an image of a dog, the AI model typically returned the more common dog breeds (Golden Retrievers) and less frequently the rarer breeds (French Bulldogs).

Over time, the cycle reinforces and compounds when future generations of AI models are trained on these outputs. It starts to forget the more obscure dog breeds entirely. Soon it only creates images of Golden Retrievers.

Eventually, the researches found, there’s “Model Collapse”, where the LLM is trained so much on AI-generated Golden Retriever images that the results turn nonsensical and stop looking like dogs at all.

Now, substitute dog breeds for whatever you’re trying to create — new products, packaging, advertising, communication, and the risk is that all outputs devolve to look the same.

A related study from the University of Exeter found that AI Generation tools have the potential “boost individual creativity”, but with a “loss of collective novelty.”

The good news is that this baseline situation creates opportunities for those who can push against this status quo. Homogeneity is ultimately at odds with distinctiveness. As with all tools, it’s all in how you use them.

You can’t break through the clutter by adding to it.

Talking about humor

I wanted to share a fun podcast conversation on the power of humor as a leadership skill. I chatted with Jo Lapore, who leads Foresight globally for McDonald’s and hosts the Looking Outside podcast.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a cartoon from 2017 in the same vein of this week’s cartoon.

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-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.