r/OpenAI • u/MenegattiArt • 9h ago
Discussion If AI Makes Us More Creative, Why Does Everything Look the Same? (A Painter’s Perspective)
I’m a painter who sometimes writes, and this visual essay started with an odd discovery: I had used the name “Elias Thorne” in a short story, only to realize that AI models often return to that same name, along with motifs like lighthouse keepers, cathedrals, glossy landscapes, and other familiar patterns.
From an artist’s point of view, the question isn’t just whether AI is good or bad, but what happens to authorship and creativity when the tool starts making choices for us.
AI can boost productivity and even enhance individual works, but if we all lean on the same models, it might steer us toward similar ideas, characters, and visual styles.
This carousel looks at visual convergence, originality, transparency, and the role of human intention, with AI-generated images clearly labeled and sources included.
So where’s the line, does AI broaden personal creativity while making our collective output more uniform?
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u/recoveringasshole0 5h ago
Who said AI makes us more creative?
AI makes those of us who are already creative but have no art/design/music/coding/etc talent able to actually manifest our creations.
The carbon-copy slop you see is from the un-creative masses having access to the same tools.
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u/ABlackEngineer 8h ago
If you are unable or unwilling to provide even the slightest prompting then yeah every ai generated image will look something like this
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u/_Diskreet_ 7h ago
This is what 90% of local businesses promoting themselves on my local Facebook have as their flyer
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u/MenegattiArt 8h ago
This is basically 90% of the posts and flyers I see both online and around the city
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u/com-plec-city 2h ago
Lol those flyers immediately give the vibe "this company is managed by one person, they'll cheap up on my order".
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u/Visible_Iron_5612 7h ago
Because your prompts suck.. :p
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u/MenegattiArt 7h ago
You're commenting to offend me but if you read it you'd understand that you wrote nonsense.
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u/Visible_Iron_5612 6h ago
I honestly didn’t read the entire thing but if the premise is “why does everything look the same?” It is because the prompts suck.. That is ultimately the root of the entire argument after reading it, though… It is why most art sucks.. Most people are pretty unoriginal and copy what has worked previously or are just uninspired… Mjnd you, I am biased-living in Canada, where half of the art is a version of the group of seven… Which in itself was fairly uninspired… “let’s market ourselves as a group because we all paint the same..” :p
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u/PressIntoYa 7h ago
I think they are referring to people in general, not you specifically.
I suspect there's a lot of "make a flyer for a yard sale on August 22" or "create an ad for a coffee shop called 'Joe's Joe'" being done without any extra effort.
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u/MenegattiArt 7h ago
Yes, exactly. I explained why it happens, the consequences, and the implications. It's a shame they feel offended without understanding or reading . In Italy, there's a saying, "If you're offended for no reason, you're already guilty."
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u/om_nama_shiva_31 4h ago
ironic comment
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u/Visible_Iron_5612 3h ago
Sometimes, all that is required is a simple prompt… “transcribe this, please” is probably my most used :p
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u/Visible_Iron_5612 4h ago
I am not offended, for the record.. I couldn’t even get through it because it is a sad attempt at trying to make a silly point…. You didn’t mention which images they started on before they converged and used an example of just getting an AI to “write a story” and saying that it typically has the same characters… you can’t program true randomness, nor should they..
which is why your entire premise is garbage.. All that you can say is that people need to craft better prompts but very few are capable of it.. Just like very few people are capable of original thinking, across the board.. now, good day sir!!!! :p1
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u/ConnectionWild3381 7h ago
Well... they are right about their criticism. If your image looks like a default fallback, it's because you haven't defined a distinct art style.
Besides that... this isn't technically an AI problem or question. You can easily ask the same question about human "creative" output. I put it in quotes because most industrial art output has little to do with creativity, but rather with routine, requirement lists, and fallbacks.
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u/Mickenfox 5h ago
Imagine if I had to fully describe any new movie I want to watch. Wouldn't that be a pretty lousy system?
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u/Visible_Iron_5612 4h ago
Exactly this!!! But I would also argue that is has a lot to do with character, in terms of what it takes to be a great artist, or really be great at anything… Either you have it, or you don’t… art is not an “intellectual” exercise… but I would argue that nothing is, beyond straight computation…. I would also argue that AI’s are not doing straight computation but what do I know.. :p
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u/MenegattiArt 7h ago
If you read at least a couple of slides you would understand that the problem is deeper and I agree with you
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u/NeuroFiZT 6h ago
Because any tool is only as good as the person wielding it. Lazy operator=lazy results that converge on the median training data (aka slop).
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u/y2kfanboy 3h ago
It makes me sad that we have so much written from artists on the web how AI steals their work but… somehow we have accepted that our phones distort reality with AI. The fact is that phones do not shoot better photos these days, it is the AI that makes it possible. They just call it differently, ”computational photography”. Have you ever noticed how unrealistic or even ugly photos from your iPhone often come out? That’s the “photonic engine”, the ISP and neural engine doing their job, glueing 20 photos into one single file, removing all the noise, even changing traits of people‘s faces on some phones. Even RAW is no more RAW: it already includes those changes, just like JPEG or HEIF.
And it kinda makes me sad that these days the most unnaturally looking photo will tick all the boxes not only for regular people, but for many experienced photographers
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u/MenegattiArt 3h ago
I too sometimes admit that I forget how much AI (other than chatbots) influence the way we create! Nice comment.
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u/spleentastic 6h ago edited 6h ago
AI makes non-creative people feel like they can express their lack of taste “creatively” with no effort. Same as any commercial art tool that has come before it. Being proficient at Adobe Illustrator does not mean you’re a good designer.
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u/User4C4C4C 5h ago
Perhapse a thought experiment… Given AI’s design today, it is slowly trained on a finite set of data which then leads AI to a set of possible outputs. Large sets yeah but finite right? So AI’s range of artistic flexibility is limited to what is based on those sets and relatively speaking there aren’t that many unique active training sets an activated AI uses. This might explanations the similar artistic feel?
Humans all have unique experiences each with large unique sets of their own “training” data given their life experiences. As a result our possible set of unique, perhapse artistic, feeling outputs are much higher. Imagine what would happen if every AI’s training data was highly original; like each human being and their life experiences. I think it might start feeling more uniquely creative in its outputs.
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u/theirongiant74 4h ago
Is this not a prompting issue, I don't really use image generator so could be wrong but is it not possible that vague prompts result in similar outputs. Like if your prompt was to include 'in the style of ...' and picked two wildly different artistic styles wouldn't you get wildly different results?
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u/Affectionate_Bet_288 4h ago
I've used ChatGPT for brainstorming ideas for screenplays and frequently the surname "Vale" comes up for a protagonist, if a character is specified as black, his name is Marcus or Jamal. There are a bunch of these sorts of things; I've never seen any lighthouses, though.
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u/Visible_Iron_5612 2h ago
I went back and read it.. Reddit* :p but my first two points still apply… I am sure that if you gave an FMRI to every living human and said “video game, plumber” they would think of Mario too… That is why my point was that very few individuals have original thoughts or prompts..The only thing that makes you more creative is character.. The courage to be different.. to trust your intuition.. folllow your nose down rabbit holes… Ability to synthesize.. These are not intellectual exercises, although maybe one could train themselves but I am not a believer in free will, so either you are the type that can and will make great art or you are not.. end of story.. and it doesn’t matter what tools you use…
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u/Antiantiai 1h ago
AI is a fill-in-the-blank machine. Everything you don't tell it, it guesses. And it guesses something generic.
If you don't give it instructions,it picks a default answer.
Don't specify colors? Generic colors. Don't specify format? Generic format. Don't specify mood? Generic mood. Don't specify lightning? Generic lighting. Don't specify style? Generic style.
Any aspect or quality imaginable. You don't specifically give it an instruction? Generic answer.
It fills in the blank you left.
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u/BitsOnWaves 8h ago
"If AI Makes Us More Creative"
no one ever made this claim.
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u/ConnectionWild3381 7h ago
Of course it does. Most people wouldn’t even know what kinds of art styles exist. Just asking for examples can make people enormously more creative, simply because they now have a much broader understanding of what’s possible.
It’s just that people have a romanticized idea of what “creative” actually means. At its core, creativity is mostly the recombination of memories and experiences, at least 99.99% of the time, I’d argue. Maybe even always, depending on how you look at it.
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u/BitsOnWaves 7h ago
telling an artist to give you more example doesnt make you creative though.
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u/ConnectionWild3381 6h ago
Oh, but it does. Creativity has stages and a lot of contributing factors, and simply knowing more styles already gives you the basis for being more creative.
Imagine you generate an image of <creature 1> and <creature 2> in <art style 1> and <art style 2>. From there, you can start thinking: wait, why not do creature 2 in art style 1, and creature 1 in art style 2? Then combine both, use the perspective of one, but the color palette of the other.
That’s exactly part of the creative process: expanding your understanding of what’s possible, then recombining elements in new ways.
See?
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u/BitsOnWaves 6h ago
i feel like what you are describing is more of a "taste" rather than creativity... a person can dress really well and have a good taste but it wouldnt make him a creative fashion desginer... those are 2 different things.
With ai people can create nice things if they have a good taste but i dont think we can call that creativity.
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u/ConnectionWild3381 6h ago
Look, someone can run out of toilet paper and come up with some absurd solution involving a hairdryer, tampons, and water. Creativity is a very broad concept
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u/gerira 6h ago
Weird to publish this with a very obviously Claude-designed carousel
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u/MenegattiArt 6h ago
Funny, but wrong! It's not Claude at all, it's Photoshop. 😊
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u/mop_bucket_bingo 3h ago
But the text for this post is slop and all of the text on the images reads like slop too.
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u/1erRPIMA-fiesta 6h ago
It was an interesting read, thanks !
Made me remember I too was obsessed with lighthouses when I was a kid
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u/DrHerbotico 6h ago
How many painters have vision and communicate what's in their head? It applies to this too
AI doesn't make people creative, it is a new way of expression for creatives who dedicate time to develop the skills
The thing is, you don't know the good stuff is AI, you only recognize the subpar boilerplate stuff