It’s easy to feel doom-laden by the arrival of AI into the worlds of advertising and design. At a time when many design projects already blur too easily into each other, it seems likely that artificial intelligence will only make this process easier, and the creation of truly original design ideas harder.

This was Max Ottignon’s opening gambit at his recent talk for Barcelona’s Offf festival, held at Disseny Hub from April 6-8. While many designers take an invitation to speak at Offf as an opportunity to talk the audience through a portfolio of their greatest hits, Ottignon instead chose to talk about two of the topics most preoccupying the industry today: AI and the ‘blandification’ of design.

“At the moment what is happening is AI is making it incredibly easy to make more of the same,” he explained. “In all your feeds, everything you look at on the internet is the same. And we finally get to this place that I call the ‘age of convergence’…. Suddenly we’re just hurtling into this, not just a sea of sameness, but a world of sameness.”