Advertising once worked like a well-planned dinner party. The strategist decided the seating plan, the topics of conversation, and when to change the subject. The creative lit the candles, poured the wine, and told the story that made the whole evening worth remembering.
Now the party has collapsed into chaos. The strategist is in the kitchen fiddling with soufflés. The creative is scribbling seating plans on napkins. And the machine, our shiny new sous-chef, has prepared twenty main courses at once, none of which anybody particularly wants to eat.
It looks lively. In truth it is cannibalism. Everyone is trespassing into everyone else’s garden. And when everyone does everything, nobody does anything well.
The strategist loses the depth of thinking that once made them valuable. The creative loses the craft that once made them indispensable. And the idea, the very heartbeat of advertising, is left without a clear owner.
The Result of the Collapse
For Agencies Agencies now resemble karaoke bars. Everyone is singing, but the tune is borrowed and the lyrics are hollow. The flood of AI-generated mockups dazzles in pitch rooms but collapses in the real world. Timelines do not accelerate because of efficiency but because confusion creates the illusion of speed.
Without role clarity, agencies drift into performance theatre. They produce mountains of content but little of it connects. They mistake volume for value. And as they try to be everything at once, they slowly become nothing in particular.
For Clients Clients are promised brilliance but delivered decoration. They receive work that looks like advertising but lacks the spine of strategy and the soul of creativity. They are drowned in outputs yet starved of ideas.
This confusion erodes trust. Clients cannot tell who to hold accountable. Was it the strategist, the creative, or the tool? In the absence of ownership, everything feels disposable. The brand pays the price in irrelevance, sameness, and wasted budgets.
Sooner or later, clients will stop seeing agencies as partners in meaning and memory. They will treat them as suppliers of cheap, forgettable content. Once you become a supplier instead of a partner, the game is already lost.
The Mirage of AI
The industry loves to blame AI. But AI did not kill creativity. It simply handed us a mirror.
AI is not the executioner. It is the accomplice. It exposes our professional insecurities with embarrassing clarity.
Strategists, anxious about irrelevance, spend hours fiddling with Midjourney prompts, writing their own scripts and slogans and call it “ideation.” Creatives, equally anxious, hide behind pseudo-intellectual decks and sprinkle jargon about “cultural tension” like salt on a bland meal. The machine obligingly produces endless outputs. All style, no spine.
The real problem is not the tool but the abdication of responsibility.
We have built an illusion of abundance. Agencies flaunt hundreds of mockups as though volume equals value. Clients nod approvingly, dazzled by the spectacle, only to wonder six months later why nothing shifted in the market. It is like serving twenty desserts while forgetting the main course.
Here lies the paradox. AI makes it easier than ever to generate what something might look like. But it does nothing to answer why it should exist at all. Without the “why,” the “what” is nothing more than decoration.
Once you mistake decoration for strategy, you are no longer an agency. You are a content farm with better lighting.
Who Owns the Idea?
This is the question we dare not ask. Who owns the idea now?
The Strategist Knows the market, the culture, the numbers. Can explain why something matters. But too often delivers skeletons without flesh.
The Creative Knows craft, taste, instinct. Can make an idea sing. But without direction risks producing viral fluff shareable, forgettable, meaningless.
The Machine Generates speed, scale, and surprise. Produces endless options in seconds. But cannot decide meaning. It has no skin in the game.
Today everyone points at everyone else, and the idea becomes orphaned. Nobody claims it, nobody defends it. And if nobody owns the idea, then nobody owns the outcome.
The Missing Role
What agencies need is not blurred roles but sharper ones. Someone must guard the idea. Someone must hold the “why” steady while the “how” evolves. Call them strategist, call them creative, call them lunatic it does not matter. But without a custodian of meaning, the machine will multiply nothing into infinity.
The great irony is that advertising was always about ownership. Someone had to stand in the room and say, “This is the idea. This is what we believe.” Without that moment, there is no risk, no courage, and no chance of resonance.
The danger of AI is not that it replaces us.
The danger is that it tempts us to replace ourselves. We confuse output for ideas, iteration for invention, role-swapping for collaboration.
We tell ourselves that cost-cutting justifies confusion. That speed justifies shallowness. That abundance justifies emptiness.
But every brand is built on memory, meaning, and commitment. And memory, meaning, and commitment do not emerge from machines. They come from people willing to own ideas.
So the question remains. Should we really let this continue just because it cuts costs?
We are living through the collapse of the old world, and the quiet construction of a new one. From artificial intelligence and clean energy to bioengineering and digital governance, the core systems that defined the last century are rapidly being dismantled and replaced. But this isn’t just about technology. According to futurist Peter Leyden, we’re at a historic turning point: One of the rare moments in American and global history when everything gets reimagined at once.
Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, certified teacher, research author, and former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.
AI was supposed to reinvent advertising. To make it intimate. Tailored. A whisper in your ear, not a billboard in your face.
Instead, most AI ads today feel like generic upscale animation slick, polished, but soulless. They don’t feel personal. They feel mass-produced and very similar to one another.
The illusion of personalization
Agencies love to say “personalization at scale.” What we’re really seeing is templating at scale. A character model reused, a background swapped, a few lines of text rotated. The result: ads that look identical across brands, categories, and countries. I can’t help wondering: are they actually selling the product, or just selling the illusion of innovation?
It’s creative déjà vu.
– Nearly 90% of advertisers are already using AI to make video ads (IAB, 2025). – Yet consumers aren’t fooled: NielsenIQ found many describe AI ads as “boring,” “annoying,” and “confusing” (Nielsen/OKO One, 2024).
If the promise was intimacy, the delivery feels like an overproduced screensaver.
The data proves what’s missing
When AI is used for real personalization, the results are different:
– MIT researchers (2025) found personalized AI video ads boosted engagement by 6–9 percentage points, while cutting production costs by 90%(MIT IDE, 2025). – Headway, an edtech startup, reported a 40% ROI increase after leaning into AI creative—but only because they combined speed with true audience tailoring (Business Insider, 2024).
The distinction is clear: personalized AI works. Generic AI doesn’t.
Template fatigue is the new banner blindness
We’ve replaced stock photography with stock animation. Banner blindness with template blindness. Ads that were supposed to see you instead blur into the feed.
And here’s the tragedy: the tech could do more. AI can adapt mood, context, culture, even language nuance. But right now, most agencies are chasing speed over meaning volume over resonance.
The fork in the road
The industry faces a choice:
– Keep churning out glossy, generic animations that look expensive but feel empty. – Or use AI as a scalpel cutting deeper into personalization, creating work that actually feels alive to the person watching.
Because if AI is just helping us produce better-looking wallpaper, then it’s not innovation. It’s stagnation with better rendering.
Sam Altman, the man who helped turn the internet into a theme park run by robots, has finally confessed what the rest of us figured out years ago: the place feels fake. He scrolls through Twitter or Reddit and assumes it’s bots. Of course he does. It’s like Willy Wonka walking through his own chocolate factory and suddenly realizing everything tastes like diabetes.
The CEO of OpenAI worrying about bot-ridden discourse is like Ronald McDonald filing a complaint about childhood obesity. You built the thing, Sam. You opened the door and shouted “Release the clones!” and now you’re clutching your pearls because the clones are crowding the buffet.
The bots have won, and the humans are complicit
Here’s the real kicker: Altman says people now sound like AI. No kidding. Spend five minutes online and you’ll see humans writing in the same hollow, autocorrect tone as the machines. Every Instagram caption looks like it was generated by a motivational fridge magnet. Every tweet sounds like it was written by a marketing intern with a concussion.
This isn’t evolution. It’s mimicry. Like parrots squawking human words, we’ve started squawking algorithmic filler. Our personalities are being laundered through engagement metrics until we all sound like bot cousins trying to sell protein powder.
Dead Internet Theory goes corporate
For years, conspiracy theorists have whispered about the “Dead Internet Theory” the idea that most of what you see online is written by bots, not people. Altman just rolled into the morgue, peeled back the sheet, and muttered, “Hmm, looks lifeless.” What he forgot to mention is that he’s the one leasing out the coffins. AI companies aren’t worried the internet is fake. They’re building the next tier of fakery and charging subscription fees for the privilege.
So congratulations. The paranoid meme kids were right. The internet is a corpse dressed in flashing ads, propped up by click-farms, and serenaded by bots. And instead of cutting the cord, Silicon Valley is selling tickets to the wake.
The real problem isn’t bots
It’s incentives. Platforms reward sludge. If you spew enough generic engagement bait — “This billionaire said THIS about AI. Thoughts?” the algorithm slaps a medal on your chest and boosts you into everyone’s feed. Humans, desperate for attention, start acting like bots to compete. The lines blur. Who’s real? Who’s synthetic? No one cares, as long as the dopamine hits.
And that’s the rot. It’s not that AI makes the internet fake. It’s that humans are happy to fake themselves to survive inside it. We’re not just scrolling a dead internet. We’re rehearsing our own funerals in real time.
The coffin is already polished
So yes, Sam, the internet is fake. It’s been fake since the first influencer pretended their kitchen counter was a five-star resort. You’re just noticing now because your reflection is staring back at you. You built the machine, you fed it our words, and now it spits them back at you like a funhouse mirror. Distorted. Recycled. Dead.
The internet didn’t die naturally. It was murdered. And the suspects are still running the gift shop.
