The AI Creative Takeover

The AI Creative Takeover: A Double-Edged Sword for Marketers

The rise of generative AI is transforming how marketing content is created.

Websites, images (like the one above), copy and even entire ad campaigns, can now be produced with minimal human input.

Platforms like Meta and Google are rolling out AI tools to automate ad creation, which is hugely frustrating when interfering with the buying process.

Meta, as we have talked about in our Horizons series, just want your credit card details and a URL and they'll do the rest.

We have written about ITV entering the game too, with the launch of its GenAI Ads Manager.

This promises speed and efficiency, but it also sparks a pressing question:

If everything is built by AI, will all marketing creative start to look the same?

When All Creative Is AI-Generated – The Homogenisation Risk

AI excels at analysing data and optimising for what works. But if every brand uses AI drawing from the same data points and best practices, we will have a bell curve effect where creative output converges toward a bland, beige average. The more we rely on the same algorithms, the more our ads and content may all start to feel alike.

Research already suggests that while generative AI can enhance an individual’s creative work, it also tends to reduce the diversity of ideas. The speed of tech evolution over the last 15 years has been removing serendipity from our lives and it continues to accelerate.

Without human oversight, automated content can turn into low-quality “ad slop” that barely differentiates one brand from another . If every campaign is assembled by machines following the same formula, brands risk blending in instead of standing out. This is the key challenge of the AI creative takeover: a potential loss of the spark and originality that true creativity thrives on.

Levelling the Playing Field – An Opportunity for Small Businesses

t’s not all doom and gloom, in fact, the AI creative revolution brings a huge upside for small and medium businesses (SMEs). Traditionally, smaller companies struggled to produce high-quality marketing assets due to limited budgets or in-house talent. Now, affordable AI tools can generate polished copy, ads, and designs in a fraction of the time and cost. It’s lowering the barrier to entry for creative marketing. Surveys show nearly 89% of small businesses are already using AI for everyday tasks like drafting emails and creating marketing content . With generative AI, even the smallest business can create and publish marketing content on every platform with confidence, something that was much harder just a few years ago.

Adding the Human Touch - How We Do It At Altair

At Altair we use a suite of AI tools every day. AI continues to speed up our work, make us more efficient and allows us to concentrate on delivering on our experience, rather than deliver for us.

We even have a digital team, who are all digital team members. Specialist AI agents, built by Altair for Altair, each trained on its specific client, using Altair IP and Altair experience.

Our digital teams help our human teams deliver faster, more efficiently and at a higher level than ever before. But they are led by humans.

The first questions are asked by the human and the final responsibility to make optimisations or recommendations comes down to the human, who curates the AI insights, with their own insights and their colleagues' knowledge, to deliver amazing work.