The recent release of OpenAI’s latest version of Sora, their video and image generation tool, has once again set the internet on fire. Among the most eye-catching trends to emerge is the AI Doll or Action Figure style, a hyper-stylised image aesthetic that looks like it was pulled straight from the packaging of a toy aisle. The results are bold, vibrant, and undeniably shareable. But as I scroll through yet another flood of these images, I can’t help but wonder: are we witnessing the slow erosion of creativity in real time?
Now, don’t get me wrong, as someone with more than three decades of creative industry experience, I find the output genuinely impressive. Before tools like Sora existed, creating a high-quality mock-up of this nature would have required serious design skills, 3D software, and post-production. In that sense, Sora is making creativity more accessible, allowing anyone with a few words and an idea to produce something visually striking.
But therein lies the problem. Because anyone can do it, everyone is doing it.
What started as a novel and creatively inspired idea, a clever way to reimagine ourselves or characters in a toy-like format, has become carbon-copied into oblivion. The original spark of creativity that someone had in prompting this aesthetic has been overwhelmed by mass repetition. What once felt imaginative now feels template-driven. This is the dilemma of AI tools like Sora: they make it easy to create something cool, but they also make it easy to kill that same idea through overexposure.
And it happens fast. We no longer experience a slow creative cycle where ideas evolve organically, shaped by talent, technique, and experimentation. Instead, we have virality on tap. Within days, sometimes hours, an idea can be discovered, mimicked, and exhausted.
This isn’t a rant against AI. In fact, I believe it has a real place in the creative process. But there’s a distinct difference between using a tool creatively and relying on a tool to be creative for you. The nuance and intention behind an idea, the choices that give it meaning, risk being lost when the tool does most of the heavy lifting.
The core issue is not that AI enables more people to make things. That should be a good thing. The issue is that the culture of instant replication means even the best ideas no longer get a chance to breathe. They don’t get to inspire the next great idea because they barely have time to exist before they are buried in repetition.
So, where does that leave us as creatives?
I think it forces us to focus more than ever on the why behind our work. AI can help us generate, but it can’t help us care. It can’t imbue our work with intent, context, or soul. That responsibility still belongs to us.
Creativity isn’t just about the output. It’s about the thought, the risk, the journey that leads to something new. In an era where tools like Sora can generate the ‘what’ in seconds, it’s the why that will separate meaningful creative work from the noise.
We can’t stop the flood of AI content, nor should we try. But we can hold onto what makes creativity valuable in the first place: the human spark behind the idea. If we lose that, we don’t just risk diluting the quality of creative work. We risk forgetting why we create at all.