One of the most sensible concerns leaders have about AI is that it makes everything sound the same.
Spend any time on LinkedIn, in newsletters or across industry blogs and you can see why. We are surrounded by safe opinions, familiar phrasing and content that feels as though it has been lightly assembled by a machine trained to avoid offending anyone. The result is not merely bad writing. It is a wider flattening of point of view.
AI does not kill originality by itself, but it narrows collective variety when users accept its first, statistically average response. A 2025 peer-reviewed study in Computers in Human Behavior found that human-written essays contributed more unique ideas per essay than GPT-generated essays, and the diversity gap persisted even after prompt changes. A separate study by Exeter and UCL, published in Science Advances, found AI boosted individual creativity but reduced diversity across a group. Originality comes from using AI for divergence, then applying human judgment.
That concern is real. But the blame is often misplaced.
“AI does not kill originality by itself. Originality disappears when people accept the first average answer and call it finished work.”— Larysa Hale, Expert Circle
AI is built to produce a plausible answer quickly. Its first response is often the lowest-energy response: the most statistically likely, the most obvious and the safest. If a leader asks a basic question and publishes the result with minimal challenge or revision, the problem is not that AI has destroyed originality. The problem is that the user accepted the first average answer and mistook it for finished thinking.
Does AI kill originality?
In practice, AI is not so different from an intelligent but under-challenged colleague. Ask a simple question and you get a simple answer. Ask for something more nuanced, more contrarian or more ambitious, and the thinking improves.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study published in Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans analysed 2,200 college admissions essays and found that each additional human-written essay contributed more new ideas than each additional GPT-generated essay. The gap in diversity persisted even when researchers tried to improve the AI output through prompt and parameter changes.
A separate study by researchers at the University of Exeter and UCL, published in Science Advances, found that generative AI could improve creativity for individual writers, particularly less creative ones, but at the cost of collective novelty. AI-assisted stories were judged more creative in some respects, yet they also became more similar to one another, reducing diversity across the group.
That is a very useful distinction for business leaders. AI can help generate more ideas and lift weaker first drafts, but if everyone leans on it in the same shallow way, the market fills up with content that feels increasingly interchangeable.
Where human value becomes more important
This is why human taste is becoming more valuable, not less.
AI can generate volume. It can produce options. It can create routes you may not have considered. But it cannot live your commercial history, your leadership experience or your brand’s real point of view. It does not carry scars from difficult clients, hard-won lessons from failed campaigns or the practical instinct that tells you when something sounds clever but means nothing.
That is the human edge. Originality, in a professional context, rarely comes from language alone. It comes from judgment about what is worth saying, what is worth rejecting and what is strong enough to be attached to the reputation of the business.
“AI can generate possibilities, but taste is still human. The edge comes from the person who knows what is worth keeping and what should be thrown out.”— Larysa Hale, Expert Circle
How to create original content with AI: three steps
The first move is to challenge the first pass. Do not treat the initial output as the answer. Treat it as a starting point. Push for stronger angles, sharper distinctions and less obvious thinking.
The second is to use AI for divergence before human convergence. Ask for multiple routes, multiple hooks, multiple arguments and multiple framings. The point is not to publish the lot. The point is to create a broader field of possibilities, then apply human taste to select the one direction that actually deserves to survive.
The third is to inject lived experience deliberately. AI has access to patterns in data, but it does not have a life. It does not know your war stories, your contrarian observations, your personal frustrations with the market or the uncomfortable truths your competitors prefer not to say aloud. That material is often what makes the work memorable.
If leaders want to stay original in an AI-heavy environment, the answer is not to reject AI. The answer is to stop using it lazily. AI is best used as a divergence partner, not an originality replacement.
Our briefings and programme are designed for senior leaders who want to do exactly that: use AI to expand creative possibility while preserving the taste, standards and strategic edge that make a brand worth listening to in the first place.
Larysa Hale is the founder of Expert Circle and creator of the AI-Driven Marketing Growth Programme, a structured series of briefings and masterclasses for managing directors and senior leaders in professional services. She has spent over 15 years helping founders, marketing directors and business leaders build commercially grounded growth strategies.
