Creativity, AI, and the Fight Against Flattening

AI can flatten brands into sameness—or help them come alive. The difference lies in how we build: for optimization, or for emotion, creativity, and co-creation.

Creativity is a central part of the human experience, more now than ever. Technology has given us all the tools to create, remix and shape culture. Being creative is no longer extracurricular, it’s part of our daily lives.

But while many technologies have helped democratize creation, others are working against it. Algorithms serve us what they think we want to see and hear. They try to get us to consume rather than create. And many brands are using these technologies heavily, missing out on the benefits of tapping into their customers' humanity and creativity.

The result is distraction and deadening at a time when people are more ready than ever to care, to participate, to feel something.

We’re at a fork in the road with AI: it can help brands come alive, or flatten them into sameness. It can deepen creative expression, or optimize it into oblivion. The choice is in how we build.

In the quest for marketing efficiency brands have become overly predictive and optimized, leading to a loss of emotional connection and creative inspiration. This is part of a broader cultural trend—what Cory Doctorow popularized as “enshittification”—where platforms, products, and even brands degrade over time by squeezing value from users rather than creating it with them.

As brands go, few are more publicly ensnared in this trend than Spotify. What was once a portal to music discovery now too often feels like an echo chamber. Artists are frustrated. Users are bored. The playlists repeat. The predictions miss. It’s algorithmic sameness disguised as personalization. People feel this deeply, and this once-beloved brand has lost its luster for many.

The counter-trend to this is what I'll call "Minecraftification." Minecraft has become a ubiquitous and beloved brand over the last two decades. It's been built almost entirely on the creativity of its users, but is also somehow deeply consistent, recognizable and well-architected. The Minecraft visual style and tonality are iconic, but every experience is a little different. Because it’s shaped by people outside the brand it can stretch across many moments, many emotions (even negative ones) and many different cultural contexts.

This is the Minecraft model:

• Player-shaped: Each user co-creates the experience

• Emotionally varied: The game holds joy, chaos, boredom, awe

• Culturally expansive: It flexes across ages, geographies, subcultures

Brands can learn a lot from how Minecraft operates. They suffer when they undervalue emotion and novelty. The systems many brands are built on don’t reward surprise, they reward stickiness. And the more predictable the experience, the less connected people feel to it.

Surprise, personal resonance, and meaning don’t come from top-down control. They come from systems that invite participation. This is difficult to achieve when brand management is treated as "governance" and driven by static guidelines, but emerging AI tech has the potential to help every brand operate in a better way.

It might sound strange to say that AI could make brands feel more human. But that’s exactly what’s starting to happen. In the past, brands needed to be boiled down to their simplest essence. Not because it was the best thing to do, but because it was the easiest thing to manage. A small brand team needed a simple playbook to make big decisions, and automated systems that delivered the right message to the right person at the right time. Effectiveness and efficiency were the goal, something that could deliver results with the least amount of human effort.

But in today’s cultural climate, effectiveness isn’t enough. People don’t just want relevance—they want resonance. They want to feel something, and they want to make something. And that means brands have to shift from being merely effective to being affective—creating real emotion and attraction.

This is where AI has surprising power because it can help brands express themselves in more ways, in more places, with more emotional intelligence. An AI-powered brand isn’t just fluent in brand guidelines. It’s fluent in context: cultural norms, human needs, creative impulses, changing sentiment, emerging language. It can help a brand show up with nuance, even at scale—and invite people in more easily.

The result is a brand that behaves less like a broadcast and more like a living system—able to listen, adapt, and connect in intimate, unexpected, and emotionally meaningful ways.