Cannes Lions 2025 was a fluorescent blur of rosé, yachts, and worried side-stage whispers that every AI-assisted pitch deck felt cloned from the next. Forrester and the 4A’s now estimate that three out of four U.S. marketing agencies deploy generative-AI tools – and most are eating the costs themselves. Great for speed; catastrophic for distinctiveness. One creative director quipped on LinkedIn that he could “swap agency logos and no client would notice”. Welcome to the era of AI sludge – mass-produced prose that glides straight down the middle. This piece unpacks why sameness happens and offers an alternative, built on divergence, debate, and decisive human editing.
The sludge index is real
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75 % adoption, minimal differentiation. Agencies raced to embed GPT-style assistants, yet few changed how they brief or judge the output.
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“Can’t tell who wrote the deck.” Cannes hallway chatter – and a clutch of CMOs quoted in post-festival recaps – point to blind taste tests where even insiders mis-identify their own agency’s work.
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Creative morale dip. The 4A’s Look Ahead memo warns of “emerging sameness risks” as AI regulation and client anxiety push teams toward safest-possible copy .
If every shop submits the same median-tone manifesto, bravery doesn’t scale – beige does.
Why models converge
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Median-seeking learning. Large language models maximize the probability of the next token, so the center of the bell curve wins by design. Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) then sands away unlucky edges.
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Prompt monoculture. Search GitHub for “creative prompt” and you’ll find thousands of identical templates beginning “Write a bold, disruptive campaign idea…” – which reliably returns the same “bold, disruptive” clichés.
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Fear-driven editing. Rushed teams accept the first fluent paragraph because it feels “done,” ignoring the signal that fluency ≠ originality.
“Statistically safe copy is still copycat copy.”
Sparks vs Sludge – Our antidote
Prometheus, the engine behind our upcoming Forge UI, attacks sameness in three deliberate steps:
| Step | What happens | Why it matters |
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Graph divergence |
The brief explodes into contradictory riffs, each mapped to its own node in a directed graph. |
Diversity before alignment forces distance between first-wave ideas. |
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Multi-model debate |
Nodes fan out to multiple LLM adapters – Claude 3 Opus, GPT-4o, DeepSeek R1 – then cross-reference one another. |
Competing language instincts surface edge metaphors the median would hide. |
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Human “director’s cut” |
Creatives view branches like film takes – keeping sparks, cutting sludge. |
Humans stay the arbiters of taste, not token probability. |
“A brainstorm is a graph, not a paragraph.”
(Prometheus is in closed beta; mechanics may evolve before public release.)
Three moves you can steal today
- Prompt inversion. Before asking for polish, ask for “five outrageous wrong answers.” Absurdity jolts the creative cortex; refinement then sculpts marble from rubble.
- Cheap contrarian runs. Fire the divergent prompts through a low-cost model such as Claude Haiku, then enhance the survivors in GPT-4o. Finance will cheer, and you’ll still widen the search field.
- Director’s-cut editing. Treat every AI output like a film take: only one makes the reel. Ruthless selection beats automatic acceptance.
“Kill your prompt darlings before they kill your pitch.”
A yard-stick for originality
Talk is cheap; entropy isn’t. We prototype an internal metric called Spark Entropy – a Jaccard-style distance between idea summaries. Higher distance = fresher spark. While we’re refining the maths (watch this space), the principle holds: measure divergence first, polish later.
What outside observers are saying
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Winsome Marketing dubbed Cannes 2025 a “champagne-fuelled identity crisis,” noting that execs are “simultaneously celebrating and mourning the end of advertising as they know it”.
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MediaPost warns that fully agentic media buying could erode agency differentiation if copy and placement both become automated.
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Forrester/4As highlight the commercial strain: agencies absorb generative-AI costs today, risking a race to the bottom on both price and creativity.
The consensus: speed is up, but so is sameness. Originality is now the scarce asset.
The road ahead
APES ON FIRE was founded on a single provocation: “Ignite bold ideas, faster.” As our Prometheus engine moves toward public beta this fall, we’ll share code-agnostic playbooks, open datasets, and how-tos. Join the Public Beta Waitlist now, and don’t miss out on testing the future of innovation and ideation.