In marketing and advertising, noise describes the overwhelming saturation of brands all competing for the attention of the same audience, often in the same medium. Times Square, New York City, is the ultimate example, a gallery of creative ambition. Yet only recognised brands and genuinely clever creatives truly peacock. The rest are lost in a migration of mediocrity.

The brands that stand out from the noise don’t do so by accident. They’ve invested time either building long-term brand awareness or developing a deep understanding of culture, customers, and connection. They’ve thought carefully about who they are and how they show up.

The problem today is that it’s become far too easy to bypass that thinking altogether.

It’s now entirely possible for a mediocre marketing manager—often overworked, under-resourced, and under pressure—to automate their role and mass-produce equally mediocre messaging using a parade of pre-approved templates. And to be fair, I get it. Marketers are busy. Expectations are unrealistic. Technology is moving faster than the Road Runner on his third coffee. And AI? It’s just so damn easy to use.

And honestly, so what if you save time by outsourcing your creative copy to ChatGPT? It’s not like anyone would know.

(We do, by the way.)

That’s the issue. It’s happening so often that creative concepts are starting to read, sound, and look exactly the same. Not only do I have to mourn the death of originality, but I also get to watch brands often, through the hands of burnt-out marketing managers rely on AI, only to drown in the very noise that AI and cognitive offloading helped create.

But the real noise in copywriting isn’t AI itself.

It’s the language being fed into it.

Words like top-notch, elevate, and boost were once meaningful. Today, they’re semantic filler. Safe. Inoffensive. Non-committal. They don’t describe value, they gesture at it. They exist because they’re easy, because they don’t require proof, and because they allow marketers to sound productive without being specific.

AI reproduces these words at scale not because they’re effective, but because they’re statistically common. The result is vocabulary inflation: every brand claims excellence, yet none can articulate what makes them different.

If a word can be removed from your copy without changing the meaning, it was never doing any work.

So how do we remain buoyant in this sea of same-same-but-different?

It’s simple. We give ourselves time to think.

We push back on the assumption that marketers can do everything, and on the idea that AI is the great productivity saviour. Because in reality, AI is no different from any other system: bad data in, bad data out. When you feed it safe language and surface-level thinking, it will faithfully return exactly that—only faster.

AI didn’t kill originality.
Safe language did.

So next time you’re inputting a prompt, for the love of all things creative, make sure at least 50% of it comes from you.