Has the internet breathed its last, or does it just need rewilding? Chris Edwards at Tommy considers what Sora 2, and other AI tools, are doing for creativity on the web.
A still from a Sora 2-created video
The ‘dead internet theory’ began as an online conspiracy: a half-joke that most of what we see online isn’t made by people anymore but by bots talking to other bots. Scroll your feed long enough, and it no longer sounds so far-fetched.
With Sora 2 (or by the time you’re reading this, yet another AI level-up) now generating hyper-real videos that could pass for anything from a fashion film to a Jake Paul personality switch, the line between ‘made by humans’ and ‘made for humans’ is blurring fast. The internet hasn’t died exactly; it has just stopped being alive in the way it once was. What fills our screens now isn’t expression, it’s output. Endlessly recycled, optimized, and reposted until the meaning drains out.
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We have built a system where the web no longer reflects human creativity; it mirrors machine logic. It is made about people, not for them. Algorithms scrape, splice, and re-serve our own behavior back to us until everything feels strangely familiar. You have seen that ad before, you have heard that tone of voice, you have watched that ‘original’ video. Playbooks are swapped (and used as clickbait on LinkedIn), the content may change, but the pattern stays the same.
You can feel it in search results too: the same SEO (or GEO as it is now)-crafted blur of ‘10 ways to…’ and ‘Top tips for…’ written to please a crawler, not a person. You can feel it in influencer content that could be anyone, anywhere. Sameness has scaled faster than creativity. The algorithm is the all-seeing eye: the emperor decreeing what lives and what dies.
The 90-9-1 rule (voyeurs-curators-creators in an online community) has been exponentially diluted with ‘AI slop’.
However, it isn’t all doom and gloom: this erosion of trust and increasing sense of artificiality is actually a creative brief.
When audiences do not know what is real, they start looking for signs of life, for work that feels made. Distinctiveness, once a branding principle, is now proof of existence.
That is why the brands that will win over the next few years will not be the ones who chase every new format or train their tone of voice on whatever the latest algorithm rewards. They will be the ones who show their fingerprints. The ones with a recognizable sensibility, a point of view, and the confidence to make something that could not come from anyone or anything else.
The data backs it up, we’ve all read it – from the textbooks to the LinkedIn posts: creative quality remains the number one driver of advertising effectiveness. Distinctive brands build memory faster and last longer. Mental availability, being the brand people think of in the moment that matters, is fueled by consistent, unique brand assets and ideas that make people feel something real.
We have spent a decade optimizing for attention, when the real advantage now is authenticity. Not the ‘unfiltered’ kind that has become its own aesthetic, but work that carries a maker’s signature.
In a disposable world, craftsmanship becomes a competitive edge. In the real world, hand-made has always implied premium and luxury, a sign that care, skill, and human time were invested. The same is true for creativity: human-made work signals value. It stands apart precisely because it shows effort, intention, and originality that cannot be replicated.
A campaign with a sense of authorship, a line that only one brand could say, or a visual world that does not feel like a template are the things that cut through the synthetic fog. The irony is that while machines can fake fluency, they cannot fake intention. A model can generate a film, but it cannot know why it should exist. It can remix style but not purpose. That is the gap, and the opportunity, for creative people and brands.
The internet might not be dead. It may just have become overgrown, and it needs rewilding with ideas and content that bring it alive again.
The future of creativity will not be about resisting technology; this isn’t an anti-AI article, far from it. It will be about using it in service of something unmistakably human. Work with a pulse. Brands with a point of view. Craft that proves someone cared enough to make it well.
In a world full of synthetic sameness, the most distinctive thing a brand can be is real.
Tommy
Tommy are a Global Creative & Production Studio who stand out in the sea of sameness to deliver work that is truly distinctive. Ideas that are different. New. Evoke...