The blandness of AI brands

Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger.

It’s often said – rightly, in my experience – that agencies are their own worst clients.  Whatever the house job may be, from a whole new brand identity to a new website right down to this year’s agency Christmas card (do agencies still do Christmas cards?) you can be sure it’ll be a nightmare.

No-one will do anything till it’s far too late.  We’re all too busy with client work.  By the time anyone remembers, it’ll be a total panic.  The brief will be hopeless, confused, unfocused, trying to please everyone and achieving just the opposite.  And the approval process will be agonising, an interminable muddle of indecisiveness until finally the project runs out of time and the Christmas card won’t be ready till Easter unless someone says yes to something.

There are probably lots of reasons for this, but there’s one that’s easy to understand.  Our work on our own account goes straight into our shop window.   Inevitably, our identity says this is the best we can do in visual identity, our website is the best we can do in websites and our Christmas card says that we still haven’t quite given up on sending Christmas cards.   This is what we can do, a house job says, when we haven’t got a client ruining it all.

I guess the same must be true of house jobs produced by AI programs – well, it is true, whether the programs want it to be or not.  I assume that AI programs produce their own brand identities, websites and Christmas cards, and I assume that they too want the work to show them at their best.

So, taking all that into account, it really is very surprising how completely crap it is.

To start at the point where most of us first encountered AI, isn’t ChatGPT a terrible name for something so incredibly big and exciting?  “Chat” is a word for something silly and trivial, and “GPT” is bland and meaningless.  (I know what all initials in brand names stand for – I even know that “WPP” in the agency group’s name stands for Wire & Plastic Products – but I still had to look up “GPT.”  It stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.  Who knew?  Who cares?  And who will remember it tomorrow?)

The parent company name, OpenAI, is pretty hopeless in a different way.  It’s easy to understand, but it’s generic and boring.  It’s what you’d come up with if you had 30 seconds to crack the brief.  And as for the app and website, the functionality is excellent but the design and the communication are basically non-existent.

Among the major competitors, Claude and Gemini have a bit more character,  But I don’t think I’ve seen a single communication from any AI brand that has engaged, amused, surprised or entertained me.

There are two good answers to this.  One is that there’s been loads of great stuff, but I’ve missed it all.  This is perfectly possible.  The other is that it’s not the job of these programs to be engaging, amusing or entertaining.  Their job is to produce output that is engaging, amusing or entertaining, or whatever else the users creating their prompts want them to be.

I get all that.  But I still say that as far as ordinary, individual consumers are concerned, as the market becomes more crowded and competitive, being called ChatGPT will be less and less helpful.