The One Thing AI Can’t Generate: Distinctiveness
In a world of generative sameness, distinctiveness will decide who survives.
For anyone new here, I’m the founder of Woo Punch, a brand consultancy rooted in evidence-based brand design. I write about the evidence that debunks brand purpose, differentiation, brand love, loyalty marketing, customer personas, color psychology, mission statements, customer engagement, AdTech, and “hustle culture.”
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Generative AI Is A Tool, That’s It
AI will be a gift to people with ideas.
It will take the half-baked sketches, clunky drafts, and impossible-to-visualize concepts living in a creative person’s head and turn them into something polished. It will be the world’s fastest intern, able to generate mockups, explore variations, and test executions in seconds. For designers and brand builders, that’s a huge advantage.
Generative AI is Adobe Illustrator on steroids—but it doesn’t think, dream, or notice when something is truly memorable.
Designers have been here before. Every new tool—from computer fonts in the 1980s to Photoshop to Canva—was greeted with skepticism. Each was supposed to ruin the craft. Each lowered the barrier to entry. And yet, none of them erased the need for vision.
Business owners sometimes slapped Papyrus onto a sign for their Hookah bar or chiropractic office, “like a thoughtless child wandering by a garden, yanking leaves along the way.”* But most understood that wouldn’t cut it. They still knew they needed a vision—or at least some human judgment—to design a strong brand.
AI, however, is different. Many (perhaps even most) small business owners and startups won’t just see it as another tool; they’ll see it as a one-stop branding shop. Unlike Illustrator, Photoshop, or Canva—which even sloppy business owners never mistook for a full creative process—AI presents itself as the whole package: naming, logos, taglines, even full visual identities.
And that’s exactly why it’s more dangerous.
Designers understand that a tool without vision produces garbage. Business owners, however, will put far more trust into AI, assuming the tool can provide the vision itself. This is the same mistake many already make with logo generators. Logo generators are just templates disguised as customization: hundreds of variations built off the same conventions. Buyers are tricked into believing they own something unique, when really they’re choosing from a deck of sameness. AI will create the same illusion at a higher level—branding that feels catered but is fundamentally conventional.
Worse, AI will also appear strategic.
Generative AI will excel in “brand strategy theater”—the endless ritual of workshops, archetypes, color psychology, and mind maps that mimics strategy while ignoring what actually makes a brand stick. Just like designers masquerading as “brand strategists” today, AI will go through the motions of rigor while skipping what matters: distinctiveness and timelessness.
But it can’t “create a duck.”
*Still the best SNL skit of all time.
For those that don’t know, there’s also a Part 2 now.
The Power of a Duck
In 1999, American Assurance Company was just another faceless insurance company with a name nobody could remember. Even after shortening their name to Aflac, brand awareness was stuck at 10%. Even the ad agency pitching the campaign kept forgetting the name. One day, someone muttered it over and over across the office—“Aflac… Aflac…”—just to jog a colleague’s memory. The colleague laughed and said, “You sound like a duck.”1
That throwaway joke became the entire pitch: a duck that obnoxiously quacks “Aflac!” while people fumble to recall the name of their insurance provider. It was weird. Pointless. Even annoying. And it worked.
After the Aflac Duck debuted on New Year’s Eve 1999, U.S. sales jumped 29% within the first year. By year three, they had doubled. Name recognition soared from 10% to 67% in two years. Today, it’s over 90%.
The duck wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t “on brand.” It wasn’t strategic. But it was unforgettable.
AI is not currently designed for that, and it may never be.
Why AI Struggles With Distinctiveness
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or DALL·E don’t think or create. When tasked with a vision, they predict. They replicate patterns that already exist in the world.
That makes them very good at mimicking design trends, synthesizing category conventions, and producing polished, plausible outputs. In short, AI gives you what feels familiar. But true distinctiveness isn’t familiar. It breaks patterns. It violates expectations. That’s what makes it memorable.
Ask AI for a “playful but elegant” brand targeting “millennial women” and you’ll likely get back pastel “boho minimalism” paired with a two-word alliterative name and an ampersand in the middle—something like “Bushel&Basket” or “Seed&Sparrow.” Lovely. Predictable. Forgettable.
Humans, by contrast, don’t just execute; they notice when sameness is creeping in. We sense when something boring could become brilliant with the right twist. That’s how you get a duck that quacks, a gecko with a British accent, or a grocery store clerk selling car insurance. AI can create a gecko or a grocery store clerk, but it wouldn’t think to use either to sell insurance.
Generative AI has no taste, no gut, no cultural spidey sense. It doesn’t know when something is brilliant, only when it’s probable. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool in creative hands, and such a weak crutch in uncreative ones.
For small business owners, AI will look sturdy at first, but the moment they lean on it to grow their brands, it will snap in half. By the time the brand fades into sameness, the damage will already be done.
Why Meaningless Distinctiveness Matters More Than Ever
AI will make branding faster, cheaper, and more refined than ever. Today, many business owners still choose Papyrus for their chiropractic offices. But Canva has made it easier than ever to create something beautiful and fashionable—even if it’s still generic.
AI will take this further: it won’t just generate safe, generic brands; it will generate safe, generic brands that look sleek and professional. Logos will feel trendy but blend together, taglines will sound committee-written, and names will blur into a sea of sameness. Business owners will trust the tool even more, mistaking surface-level polish for truly memorable design.
Already one of the most potent advantages a brand can wield, “meaningless distinctiveness” like the Aflac Duck will become even more essential in a world overrun with competent-but-forgettable brands. When every AI-powered brand looks polished yet interchangeable, the ones that embrace something illogical, funny, or even absurd will be the brands people actually remember.
The Aflac Duck wasn’t “on strategy.” It was a random idea. A connection only a human would make.
AI can follow every rule flawlessly—but it can’t break them. Humans can. And that’s why meaningless distinctiveness is the last thing standing between a brand that fades and one that endures.
https://hbr.org/2010/01/how-i-did-it-aflacs-ceo-explains-how-he-fell-for-the-duck
Thoroughly enjoyed this! Found myself nodding along and restacking. What Gen AI tools are you finding most useful for bringing the half baked creative ideas to life?