Happy Tuesday, friends.
I'm writing this one with a fresh perspective and slightly less sleep than I'd like, after a week away with my family. (More on that at the bottom.)
This week we're talking about something I noticed at an event last week, that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since. If you've been using AI to make your marketing materials, this one is for you. Not as a "stop using AI" lecture (I'd be a hypocrite), but as a heads up about where the smart money is moving next.
Let's get into it.
☀️ THE FORECAST
Customers Can Tell. And They're Voting With Their Attention.
Here's the data point that surprised me.
A recent study found that more than 60% of consumers say they can spot AI-generated marketing content, and that they trust it less than human-made content. Even when the AI content was technically better written or better designed, people rated it as less trustworthy and less appealing.
Translation: the polish doesn't matter if the human is missing.
This is the headline shift to internalize. We're moving out of the "AI is a magic shortcut" phase and into the "AI is a tool that needs a human driving" phase. The businesses adjusting now will be ahead of the ones who don't.
Which brings us nicely to this week's Yolk.
🍳 THE YOLK
Why every AI design looks like every other AI design
I was at an event last week and had a moment. Flipping through the program book, I realized I could sort the ads into two stacks just by glancing. The AI ones, and the not-AI ones.
The AI ones were technically clean. Bright gradients, friendly geometric shapes, perfectly cropped stock-style photos, the same five fonts. They were also completely indistinguishable from each other.
This isn't a hot take about AI being bad. I use AI every single day. The issue is what happens when everyone uses the same tools with the same default settings. You get a sea of work that's competent and forgettable in equal measure.
Here's why it's happening. AI design tools are trained on existing design data and tuned toward whatever tests well. The result is a strong pull toward the safe middle. So when ten different businesses run their flyer through Canva Magic Design or Midjourney, they all end up at roughly the same aesthetic. It's the design equivalent of the houseplants-and-arched-mirror Instagram apartment that every rental looks like now.
Your weird is your asset. The slightly off-kilter color choice. The photo of you at your shop instead of a stock model. The handwritten sign your kid made. The local landmark in the background. The things AI doesn't think to suggest are exactly the things that make your business look like yours.
So use AI to assist, not generate. Get a draft, then change something. Swap a stock photo for a real one. Pick a font nobody else in your category is using. Add the actual name of your town. Anything that takes the work three steps away from the AI default is worth doing.
Polished and forgettable is the new generic. Distinctive beats clean every time.
The businesses getting recommended by AI right now are the ones that have quietly done this work already.
Most of your competitors haven't.
The window to get ahead of this is open right now.
✨ SUNNY SIDE SHORTCUTS
Three Ingredients to Spice Up Bland Designs
The squint test. Pull up your last flyer or social graphic next to two competitors'. Squint. If they all blur into the same look, you've got an AI sameness problem.
Replace one stock element with a real one. Your photo, your storefront, your handwriting, your dog. One human detail in a piece of design will make it stand out more than any color tweak ever will.
Borrow from outside your industry. AI design tools optimize within your category, so if you're a restaurant, you get restaurant stuff. The fastest way to look different is to grab visual ideas from a category nobody in yours is grabbing from.
💭 WHAT I'M COOKING
I took most of last week off. Which felt strange and necessary in equal parts.
We loaded up the car and drove to Virginia for the American Mothers convention. (Slightly surreal sentence to type: I was recognized as Maine Mother of the Year. Still processing that one.) From Maine to Virginia is not a short drive with a 20-month-old, and I had braced myself for the worst. Snacks pre-portioned, new toys and busy books strategically placed for easy access, screen time guilt pre-released, expectations set somewhere around "we will survive this."
Reader, he was a champ. Both ways. And here's the part I'm still a little smug about: zero screen time. Not on the way down, not on the way back. Just books, snacks, songs, window-watching, and an extremely patient mom and dad rotating driving and diaper changing. Babbling at trucks, napping at exactly the right moments, screaming only at just the right moment when Dad needed to be on an important phone call. Toddlers, it turns out, can rise to the occasion when you don't have a backup plan. Good to know.
We stayed in this gorgeous Airbnb in Falls Church, which I now have to recommend to anyone planning a trip to the DC area. The neighborhood was the kind that makes you say "we should move here" three times a day even though you absolutely shouldn't. Tree-lined streets, walkable everything, the kind of front porches that make you want to drink coffee on them.
I sprinkled in a tiny bit of work because that's who I am, but mostly I just got to be a person with my people for a few days. Toddler moments in parking lots. Slow mornings. Meeting new people. Someone else cooking. The good stuff.
Funny thing. The week I unplugged the most was also the week I had the most clarity about what I want this year to look like. Maybe that's the lesson. Or maybe I'm just well-rested. Probably both.
See you on the sunny side,
Heather ☀️
Sunny Side Up is a free weekly newsletter for small business owners who want to grow with modern marketing and AI, written by Heather Pouliot of Brightside Creative in Augusta, Maine.
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