For years I have complained about sameness on the web. I wrote about it back when every software company had the same gradient headline and the same three feature cards, and I put it down to best practice, to optimisation, to everyone reading the same advice and arriving in the same place.
That was designers copying each other. Slow, human, and at least occasionally examined.
What I noticed this winter feels different in kind, not just in degree. The machine has been trained on the average of everything that came before, so the machine produces the average, and the average now arrives at a scale and a speed that no amount of human copying could reach.
Ask for a landing page and you get the landing page. Not a landing page. The landing page, the mean of every landing page that existed before the training cut off, complete with the hero, the three cards, the testimonial, the pricing table, and the dependable blue button.
And it is competent. That is the part that has stayed with me. If it were bad, nobody would ship it. It is good enough that someone on a deadline, without a strong opinion about it, will look and think, that will do. I understand the instinct; I have had it myself. But a great many people are making that same reasonable choice at the same time, and the web is converging on a single template faster than it ever has.
I do not know yet what to do about it. I only know the answer is not to work harder inside the average, and I have a quiet suspicion that the businesses willing to look like something in particular will be glad they did.