# Platforms’ AI dilemma: scale without sameness > Source: > Published: 2026-07-10 04:01:00+00:00 Connect with execs from Axios, The New York Times, Paramount and more. [VIEW PASSES](https://digiday.com/events/digiday-publishing-summit-sep-26/?source=display&utm-source=display) Nearly every big platform at Cannes Lions said AI makes creativity faster. Some of them quietly acknowledged that might be the problem. As advertisers use the same AI tools to make ads at scale, platforms are seeing a new risk: automated content can begin to look and feel the same, destroying the authenticity that makes them so intrinsic to people’s lives and therefore important to advertisers’ investment plans. Snap, Meta and Reddit talked about the same fear from different angles. While they’re all investing in AI-powered creative tools, execs agreed those tools should only scale their efforts, not replace the very authenticity that makes the platforms’ inventory valuable. “What we’ve seen a lot through our research is that one of the impacts [of AI] is that you end up in a world where you just have feeds of endless content that tend to look very similar,” said Abby Laursen, vp of product marketing at Snap. “It’s hard for people to know what to trust and what to believe in.” That probably is arguably less pronounced for Snapchat as it would be for others. The mobile messaging platform has long distanced itself from social media, focusing more on the direct messaging component it was built around than the newsfeed shift that swelled around it. “We have a really unique position in that emerging reality to say our platform is about real connections, real relationships,” Laursen added. “We have ads experiences that allow brands to be part of those real relationships, and we want AI to make that as performant and as simple as possible, as opposed to kind of creating that proliferation of content.” At Reddit, it’s about protecting authentic conversations, given the platform’s entire USP rests in the value of its communities. According to the platform’s evp ads monetization Roeloff van Zwol, creative needs to be “tailored to the conversation” within each specific Reddit community. “We want to make sure we preserve the authenticity and integrity of Reddit, and that is also true for the advertising,” he added. “There’s definitely guardrails and guidelines we use for how creative should show up.” LinkedIn argued there’s actually a structural reason why creative risks become increasingly similar. Many of the industry’s tools that advertisers use are built on the same underlying LLM models. “All of the LLMs are ultimately using the same pool of data to come up with recommendations,” said Davang Shah, LinkedIn’s vp of marketing. “At some point, you could imagine it comes to a mean.” Which is why, he said, human creativity and perspective “ultimately determine which brands stand out.” TikTok’s head of creative product strategy and operations, Moritz Bartsch, agreed that the technology itself isn’t so much the problem. The issues arise based on how marketers use it. “If everyone puts one liners in there [into the AI tools / LLMs], everyone’s going to get very generic outputs,” he said. “The tools are getting a lot easier to use. There’s a lot more options, but the strategic decisions are always going to be made by humans.” It’s a perspective echoed by Google’s president of Americas and global partners, Sean Downey, who said that AI’s real value is in speeding up execution at scale, not replacing the human behind the creative. “The most important thing of any campaign is the idea,” he said. “AI is helping them think about scale.” For Downey, AI’s role should be to help “create things faster” and produce “more versions” of campaigns — not simply replace the original idea. It’s the same philosophy Meta has adopted for its creators. The company wants the ability to remove the manual, repetitive production work for creators — not replace them outright — in a bid to preserve their relationship with their audiences. Ultimately, platforms need creator content because it’s what draws and holds attention. And that need for authenticity is heightened as feeds are now filled with a deluge of AI slop content, thanks in part to the mass availability of tools which make producing that type of content far easier. “We see the creator and their creation at the heart of this, and that authenticity with their audience,” said Yair Livne, vp product management of Facebook creators at Meta. “We’re trying to amplify that and ensure creators spend more time on that versus on the grunt work.” Which means they’re all after the same thing: automation for scale, ease, and lowering the barrier to entry. But ultimately not at the cost of replacing the human element. OpenAI, however, came at it from a different angle. While the platform acknowledges how useful automation can be for smaller advertisers, global head of ads solutions David Dugan noted how different that need is for larger advertisers. “SMBs would be very curious about how you can give me tools that help me generate creative to run ads in the simplest way possible,” he said. “That is dramatically different from a large enterprise that’s invested in their brands over decades or more and has very strict creative controls about how they serve their creative, whether it’s text or image or video. They are going to be extremely focused on control of that creative message with their agencies, and we understand those differences.” And Dugan himself has witnessed the contrast, having spent more than a decade at Meta, before heading to OpenAI to build out its ad business. “There’s no such thing as one size fits all,” he added. “You have to give the market choice and control.” ### More in Marketing #### [ To manage 300,000 creators, Unilever automates everything but the relationship ](https://digiday.com/marketing/to-manage-300000-creators-unilever-automates-everything-but-the-relationship/) Unilever is using AI to vet creators and automate workflows as it scales a 300,000-creator network without handing over creative decisions. #### [ Nike versus Adidas: Who’s spending more in race to claim the World Cup crown? ](https://digiday.com/marketing/nike-versus-adidas-whos-spending-more-in-race-to-claim-the-world-cup-crown/) With the World Cup at the midway point, ad spend estimates show the apparel rivals taking opposite tacks in their media approaches. #### [ The Home Depot sees Hispanic market as a ‘huge growth opportunity’ ](https://digiday.com/marketing/the-home-depot-sees-hispanic-market-as-a-huge-growth-opportunity/) While The Home Depot is not a sports equipment or sports apparel retailer, its consumer base has given it ample reason to develop a comprehensive retail media strategy around the World Cup.