Why AI-assisted work starts to look the same

Creatives haven't turned their backs on AI. In a DIGIT Lab survey of 500 UK creative professionals, run by the University of Exeter's national centre for digital innovation, 94% said they use AI somewhere in their process and 42% rely on it daily. Envato's global study of 1,780 creatives found 49% use it every day for client work.

The same DIGIT Lab survey found that 78% believe AI is already making creative work feel soulless. Designers were the most sceptical group: 81% said AI dulls creativity, against 63% of writers and journalists. Only 11% said AI-generated output should count as true creativity.

So the people using these tools most are also the people most worried about what the tools do to the work. That deserves a better answer than "use it less".

Where the sameness comes from

A language model is built to produce the most likely continuation of what you give it. Likely is another word for typical. Ask for "a moodboard direction for an independent coffee roaster" and you get the centre of every coffee brand the model has absorbed: warm browns, hand-drawn type, a kraft-paper texture. It is competent, and it belongs to nobody.

The problem is the order of the work. When the first thing you do on a project is open a chat and ask for options, the model's defaults become your starting point. Every choice after that is an edit of the average. You can edit a long way from the average, but you rarely get somewhere surprising, because you never started there.

Professor Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen, who led the DIGIT Lab research, put it this way:

"AI will not replace creativity, but it can hollow it out if used incorrectly, producing work that feels novel at first but quickly lapses into sameness."

The phrase that matters is used incorrectly. The fix is a change of order.

An order of work that keeps the idea yours

1. Write the idea down before you open a chat

One paragraph, in your own words, before any assistant sees the project. What it is, who it is for, what it should feel like, and one thing it must never be. Your idea is unfinished at this stage, and that is the point. An unfinished idea of yours is a better starting point than a finished average.

2. Gather your own references first

Pull the photographs, books, shop fronts and old projects that made you want to do this. Ten references you chose carry more of you than a hundred an assistant suggested. Later, an assistant can help you sort them or find what connects them. It shouldn't be the one choosing them.

3. Give AI the legwork

Most of a creative project is work around the idea: research, variations on a direction you've already set, shot lists, briefs, client emails, file naming, checks against a spec. AI is very good at this, and handing it over gives you more time for the part only you can do.

A useful test for any task: if the output were wrong, would you notice straight away? If yes, it is legwork and you can delegate it. If you would only notice weeks later, when the work feels flat, that part is yours.

4. Keep a record of your decisions

Keep a short, dated log of what you chose and why. "Dropped the serif. Too close to the competitor's packaging." It takes seconds, and it does two jobs. It gives every assistant you use the same context, so it builds on your decisions rather than re-suggesting the ones you rejected. And it is a record of authorship, which matters more each year. Envato found 58% of creative professionals use AI without telling their clients. Whatever you decide about disclosure, a decision log means you can always show which choices were yours.

5. Judge the output against your brief

When an assistant hands something back, compare it with the paragraph you wrote in step 1. Asking "is this good?" lets a polished average pass. Asking "is this what I meant?" usually doesn't.

What this looks like in practice

Take the coffee roaster again. In the default order you'd ask an assistant for directions, pick the least generic of five, and spend the week trying to make it distinctive.

In this order, you'd write that the roaster's founder used to be a ship's engineer and wants the brand to feel like a well-kept engine room, never like a café. You'd collect maritime signage, brass gauges and engineering manuals. Then you'd hand an assistant real legwork: find suppliers of enamel signage, draft a shot list for the roastery, write three versions of the tasting-note copy in the voice you've described. The work that comes back is still AI-assisted. It starts from your idea, so it doesn't look like anyone else's.

Why we're building Pelagos around this

We believe people are creative beyond belief, and that the new currency is ideas. Pelagos is a private workspace that keeps each project's idea, references and decisions in one place, and lets Pelago, its assistant, hand the legwork to the AI tools you already use. Nothing that acts on your apps goes ahead without your approval. It is in private preview, and you can join the waitlist below.