It's saturation.

If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.

It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?

Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.

The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.

It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.

Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.

But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.

Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.