Lately, I’ve been noticing a curious trend. I visit one website, and then another, and… it’s almost the same. Layouts feel eerily familiar, interactions feel almost identical, and the overall "feel" is uncanny. What’s even more striking is that many of these sites have emerged in just the last year or two.
It makes me wonder. Is AI actually stifling creativity? Or is it just accelerating convergence in design?
Many of these websites appear to be built end-to-end with AI-assisted tools. From layout to copy to interaction patterns, it feels like someone hit a "VibeCode" button and got the whole package. The upside is obvious. Faster development, consistent quality, and lower cost. The downside? They all start to look and feel the same.
I could be wrong, but it seems like the proliferation of these AI-driven templates might be leading to a kind of homogenisation. The uniqueness that used to come from a designer’s experimentation or a developer’s creative twist is now being replaced by AI "best practices."
That’s not to say AI is inherently bad for innovation. It can supercharge ideas, help smaller teams punch above their weight, and unlock possibilities that were previously too time-consuming. But if everyone leans too heavily on AI-generated defaults, we might end up in a world where every new site looks like a slightly different clone of the last one.
So maybe the real challenge isn’t AI itself. It’s how we use it. If we rely on it blindly, innovation can stagnate. But if we treat it as a creative partner, a tool rather than a template factory, there’s still room for fresh ideas, bold experiments, and genuine originality.
The question I keep coming back to is this. In a world where AI can do "most of it" automatically, how do we ensure we’re still pushing boundaries instead of just reproducing what already exists?