AI Is Over-Delivering. That's the Problem.

There’s a particular kind of clip clogging my feeds at the moment. Someone’s typed a sentence into a box and out has fallen a full Hollywood action sequence — a car flips, a building folds in on itself, someone in a long coat strides away from the explosion without looking back. Every frame is busy. Every single second is doing something.

And it’s completely dead.

No coherence, no humanity, no story — just spectacle stacked on spectacle on spectacle. Eight seconds of everything happening and nothing meaning anything. Astonishing and instantly forgettable, in the same breath.

That’s the problem.

We’ve quietly decided that a good tool is a generous one — that the measure of help is how much it hands back. Ask for a paragraph, get an essay. Ask for three options, get twelve. The machine is desperate to prove its worth by sheer volume, and volume is the one thing I’ve spent twenty-five years talking clients out of.

Depth and volume aren’t the same thing. More often than not, they’re opposites.

My whole job — brand, design, strategy, the lot — is taking something tangled and making it land in the simplest way that still carries weight. Not simple as in thin. Simple as in resolved. The difference between a sentence you understand and a sentence you remember. Left to its own devices, AI reliably gives me the first and almost never the second. It fills the space. It hedges. It adds a third example when two had already done the work. It writes the way an anxious junior writes when they’re trying to show you they did the reading.

I’ve seen this film before

Every new tool arrives, and the first thing we all do is use far too much of it.

Photoshop turns up and suddenly everything’s got a lens flare blasted across it like the sun is having a breakdown. Drop shadows on everything. Bevel and emboss until the layout looks laminated. We had the gradient mesh years, we had WordArt, we had the period where every poster in Britain grew a swoosh because the software made swooshes easy. The tool could do a thing, so we did the thing — everywhere, all at once, whether it served the work or not.

New designers fall into this hardest, and I say that with real sympathy, because I was one. When you’re starting out, restraint looks like laziness. Empty space feels like a space you haven’t finished yet. So you fill it — the gradient, the second typeface, the texture, the little icon, the flourish — not because the work needs it, but because the effort needs to be seen. Cramming becomes a way of proving you tried.

AI is the most and least capable version of a junior designer I’ve ever worked with. Infinitely fast, infinitely willing, and with absolutely no instinct for when to stop.

The owl was always in the wood

I tell clients that branding is like carving an owl from a block of wood. The owl is already in there. Your job isn’t to add owl — it’s to recognise which bits aren’t owl, and take those away.

Everything good I’ve ever made came out of removal. The first version is always too much. The work is the editing — the deciding, the binning, the nerve to leave the gap. That’s the part AI can’t do for you, and I’d argue it’s the only part that was ever really the job.

Generating options is cheap now. It always was, honestly, but now it’s free and instant, which fools us into thinking it’s valuable. The expensive, human, un-automatable bit is knowing which one is right — and having the spine to bin the rest. I’ve made this case before about taste, and this is the same argument wearing a different coat. The machine can produce. It cannot decide. Deciding is taste, and taste is subtraction.

It’s the same reason I keep telling people the logo is the last thing to worry about, not the first. The instinct to add — another mark, another option, another feature — is almost always the instinct to avoid the harder work of choosing.

Use the forest, don’t worship it

None of this means I don’t use the stuff. I do, daily — mostly for research. But I treat it like a forest, not a sculptor. I’ll happily send it off to do the reading — comb a subject, surface the references, drag back the raw timber — because I’m good at carving. I can look at the pile it brings me and feel, fast, which bits have something living in them. That’s the right way round: let AI build the raw material for ideas that don’t need it to exist.

The danger was never using AI. The danger is letting its output quietly set the standard for “done.” When the tool over-delivers and you accept the whole delivery, you present the block of wood and call it an owl. That’s how a tool meant to help turns into the loudest distraction in the room.

So my actual process hasn’t changed much. Gather wide, cut hard, land on one. AI just makes the gathering faster — and a bit lonelier. The cutting is still mine. The cutting was always the point.

More was never the job. Knowing what to remove is the job.

The owl was always in the wood. AI will quite happily try to sell you the whole tree.

Hi! I'm James Kindred. I wrote this!

With over 25 years in design, branding and startups, I help businesses craft compelling identities, develop engaging assets, and build results-focused growth plans. I am AuDHD and bring my unique thought process to every project, ensuring that your brand is more than a logo. It's a reason to believe.