6 Min.It’s never been easier to produce content. A few bullet points, a good prompt, and a few seconds later, your first LinkedIn post is ready. The newsletter follows right after, the same content is turned into a blog post, and, of course, the accompanying image can also be generated using AI. Convenient? Absolutely.
Here at 2be, we use AI ourselves every day and wouldn’t want to do without many of these capabilities. It helps us with research, structuring, drafting, visualizing, and thinking things through. But the easier content production becomes, the more apparent the flip side of this development becomes: We’re producing more and more—and much of it looks and sounds increasingly the same.
When Everyone Suddenly Becomes a Content Creator
Generative AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for effective communication. Today, it no longer necessarily takes several hours to produce a first draft of usable text. Even a professional-looking image requires neither a photo shoot nor years of experience with Photoshop. This opens up enormous opportunities for companies, and small and medium-sized businesses in particular can now publish content regularly, test ideas more quickly, and showcase their existing expertise with significantly less effort.
The problem, however, arises when AI is no longer used merely as a tool but as a source of ideas for everything.
“Write me a LinkedIn post about digital transformation.”
“Create a modern image on the topic of innovation.”
“List five benefits of AI for small and medium-sized businesses.”
The result is often perfectly fine. And that’s exactly the problem. Because thousands of other people can ask the same questions and receive answers structured in a similar way. This AI uniformity is now not only readable but also visible: Anyone who regularly scrolls through LinkedIn, Instagram, or company blogs will have noticed certain patterns by now.
For written texts, these include the familiar opening lines, short paragraphs, lists of three points, five key takeaways, rhetorical questions, and major insights at the end.
But this same effect is increasingly evident in images and graphics as well. Certain illustration styles keep cropping up. People are depicted standing in front of glowing interfaces. Brains are combined with digital networks. Light bulbs symbolize innovation. Rockets represent growth. Added to this are similar icons, color gradients, lighting effects, and design elements.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that at first. But if ten companies use the same visual elements, everything eventually starts to look the same; nothing stands out anymore. Sure, all the facts are there, but the wit and individuality are lost.
What begins as linguistic consistency in text can quickly extend to the entire brand identity, and that’s when a practical AI tool turns into a brand problem.
Perfectly designed, yet forgotten
Generative AI is excellent at creating new content based on existing patterns. That’s exactly why it quickly produces results that look and read like professional work.
But professional doesn’t automatically mean distinctive; a perfectly crafted post can still be forgotten after just a few seconds. A technically impressive AI-generated image can still look just like a hundred other images in the feed, and a well-designed campaign can still fail to establish any connection to your brand.
The key question, therefore, is no longer simply, “Can we create this content using AI?” but rather,“Why should this content clearly come from us?”
A brand needs more than just a good tagline
This statement is becoming increasingly important for brand communication, because a brand isn’t created simply by making every single element look perfect. It is created through recognizability, personality, and consistency.
- How do we speak?
- What issues are we focusing on?
- What is our position?
- What stories can only we tell?
- What do our pictures look like?
- What colors, shapes, perspectives, and design elements define us?
- And most importantly: What are we consciously doing differently?
This is exactly where the simple standard prompt reaches its limits. If you simply ask AI to design something “modern,” “professional,” “innovative,” or “high-quality,” you’ll often get exactly what those terms mean on average. But for a strong brand, average just isn’t enough.
The most compelling content is usually already within the company, and to create good content, you often don’t even need to constantly come up with new topics—the most interesting stories are often right in front of you. A customer meeting that went completely differently than expected. A project where the original plan didn’t work out. A discussion within the team. A decision that no one wanted to make at first. A development in your own industry that you disagree with. Or a solution that may seem unspectacular from a technical standpoint but solves a real problem for the customer.
This is the kind of content that AI shouldn’t just come up with on its own, because it stems from experience—and it is precisely this experience that sets companies apart.
AI should enhance personality—not replace it; for us, this is one of the most exciting challenges in using AI in marketing and communication.
A CEO can record his thoughts on an industry trend, and AI helps turn them into a structured article. A sales representative contributes insights from customer conversations, and AI assists with the wording. A marketing team can use AI to develop different versions of an idea without having to start from scratch every time.
AI can also be extremely useful when it comes to images—as long as it’s combined with a clear visual language, a well-defined corporate design, and a unique creative concept.
In that case, the prompt isn’t “Create an innovative image on the topic of digitalization,” but rather the idea, perspective, and design come from us first, and then AI helps us bring them to life. That’s a crucial difference.
From “What should we post?” to “What do we have to say?”
Perhaps that’s why we also need to change our editorial planning. Instead of asking every week, “What could we post?” companies could ask more often, “What have we experienced, learned, or observed that might be interesting to others?” or “What do we have an opinion on?”
Suddenly, the role of AI is changing: It no longer has to come up with the topic, the message, the text, and the image; instead, it becomes a sparring partner. It helps us make better use of existing knowledge, further develop ideas, and implement content more efficiently.
People bring experience, attitude, and personality to the table. AI helps turn those into communication.
Less AI one-size-fits-all, more brand
The better AI systems become, the harder it will likely be to stand out based solely on technically flawless content. Flawless text will become the norm. Good images will become the norm. Professional videos will become easier to produce.
And that’s exactly why other things become more valuable: ideas. Attitude. Experience. Humor. Personality. Quirks. In short: everything that makes a brand unique.
For companies, this doesn’t mean doing without AI. Quite the contrary: those who use these new tools wisely can communicate faster and more efficiently than ever before—but ultimately, AI shouldn’t be the one determining how a brand sounds and looks.
We don’t have a content problem. We increasingly have a problem with homogeneity, and so the solution can’t simply be to produce even more content. The better question is: What can we tell, show, or say that couldn’t just as easily come from any other company?
So in the future, we should ask AI less often, “What should I post?” and tell it more often, “This is our idea. This is our experience. This is our perspective. Help us turn this into something good.”
After all, AI can produce content. But we still have to turn that content into a distinctive brand ourselves.
Curious now?
Our contact persons will be happy to help:
Matthias Brinkmann
+49 911 47494949
brinkmann@twobe.de
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