Why AI-Generated Local Ads All Look the Same and What Practitioners Can Do About It

Why AI-Generated Local Ads All Look the Same — and What Practitioners Can Do About It

Generative AI tools are producing visually homogeneous advertisements across a wide range of local organizations — from restaurants to school fundraisers — according to a report from RNZ (New Zealand's public broadcaster). The ads commonly share the same fonts, layouts, heavy text blocks, and generic imagery, the result of users running short, unspecified prompts through tools like ChatGPT.

RNZ reports that ChatGPT processes approximately 2.5 billion requests per day globally, with an estimated 15 million originating from New Zealand alone — pointing to the scale of generative AI adoption even outside major tech markets.

Key Takeaways

• Template sameness is a predictable outcome. When prompts are generic and users rely on default styles, models recombine learned patterns from overlapping training corpora — producing visuals that look like everyone else's. This is a structural feature of how these models work, not a fluke.
• Creative professionals are warning clients. Vaughn Davis, creative director at The Goat Farm, cautioned that agencies relying on the same tools risk producing "the machine-built average of every other ad."
• The fix is in the prompt — and the workflow. Practitioners who invest in stronger prompt design, brand-constrained templates, or retrieval-augmented asset libraries extract more distinctive results from the same base models.

For marketing teams and agencies, the takeaway is less about which tools to use and more about how: specificity in prompting, brand guardrails, and post-processing remain the differentiators.

Read the full article on RNZ via Let's Data Science