Everything it makes feels a bit the same
The tools make good work, but it tends to look alike. AI gives you the average of everything it learned — pleasant, reasonable, and almost never strange.
They solve problems that used to need a design team.
There is a catch. What these tools make tends to look alike.
The websites built with AI are good. They are clean, clear, and well-built. They solve problems that used to need a design team. But to a trained eye they all feel a little the same, as if drawn from one shared centre.
Writing helped by AI gets clearer, more balanced, and free of typos. That is not nothing. But it also settles into one middle register. Competent, steady, rarely surprising.
There is a reason for this. The tool gives you the average of everything it learned. And the average is almost always pleasant, almost always reasonable, and almost never strange.
The tool returns the average of its training data, which is pleasant, reasonable, and.
They solve problems that used to need a design team.
But to a trained eye they all feel a little the same, as if drawn from one shared centre.
Writing helped by AI gets clearer, more balanced, and free of typos.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls this quality smoothness. Surfaces with no friction. Things made to win a small nod of approval, not to unsettle you.
AI is the smooth made at industrial scale. It is very good at the pleasant middle. On its own, it does not reach for the strange edge where new things tend to start.
But to a trained eye they all feel a little the same, as if drawn from one shared centre.
The tool returns the average of its training data, which is pleasant, reasonable, and rarely strange.
The tools make good work, but it tends to look alike. AI gives you the average of everything it learned — pleasant, reasonable, and almost never strange.
This is the short version. Read the full-length essay, “The Swedification of Everything”.
This issue is part of Everybody's Smart, a newsletter on taste, judgment, AI, culture, cognition, and the future of professional work. New issues every 2 to 3 weeks, free on LinkedIn.
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