There’s a book that my mom used to read to my brother and I when we were kids called “If We Were All the Same.” It was written by Fred Rogers and was part of a series based around his popular long-running show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

In this particular story, Lady Elaine Fairchilde, the Neighborhood of Make Believe’s most eccentric resident, lands her green spaceship on Planet Purple, a world where everything is purple.

All of the people on Planet Purple think the same thoughts and have the same name, Paul for the males and Pauline for the females. The only animals on the planet are the Purple Pandas who also all look alike.

After becoming friendly with a couple of the Purple people and one of the Purple Pandas who are enamored by the color of her ship, Lady Elaine travels back home and decides to adopt the Purple lifestyle by painting her house, buying new clothes and only eating purple foods.

Her Purple friends visit the Neighborhood of Make Believe and are excited to see the variety of colors there. Lady Elaine introduces them to King Friday and Queen Sara, who she tries to refer to as Paul and Pauline like they do on Planet Purple.

When Purple Panda admonishes her for speaking to the king in that way, Queen Sara explains that Lady Elaine often has her own ideas and that “If we were all the same, our kingdom would be a lot less interesting.”

Purple Panda stays in the Neighborhood since he’s the only Purple Panda there, but Paul and Pauline return home and tell the rest of Planet Purple about what they saw. Everyone then begins painting their houses different colors than purple, thinking different things and embracing that it’s okay to be different.

You may be wondering to yourself why I just took six paragraphs to recount a storybook from my youth, and I assure you, there is a point. It would be awfully strange if I just said “Hey, here’s the synopsis of a book I liked when I was a kid. BYE!”

While I know the original point of the book was to teach the children of the 80s to accept people’s differences and embrace what makes them unique, it’s been in my mind lately as it relates to an issue that’s becoming more prevalent as the days go by.

With every swipe of the thumb through social media, it feels like more and more people are using AI software to create advertisements for their businesses. The same graphics pop up with the same font styles and color and the same caricature-esque figures.

If you scroll too fast, you’d have no idea who was doing the advertising.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the pressures of owning a small local business in this day and age. If you can find something to make quick and free advertising, who can argue with that? A lot of people don’t have a graphic design background or the funds to pay for a subscription to design software or even the extra time to work on those things even if they did. But the most immediate and consequential negative effect that I can see from these everyday uses of AI software is that it is robbing the world of any sense of individuality.

Thinking back to the advertisements of old, every company had something that was instantly recognizable to the consumer.

When you saw an ad featuring a Clydesdale horse, you almost immediately knew it was for Budweiser. Walking through the store, before you could even read the names in the cereal aisle, you knew what they were by the characters on the boxes. As you flipped through the channels and saw Vince the ShamWow Guy, you knew it was a commercial for the ShamWow.

(Granted, Vince did eventually move on to the Slap Chop and the Schticky but come on. He was, is and will always be the Sham-Wow Guy.)

Again, I recognize that not everybody has the budget of a large corporation to execute full-scale ad campaigns. I’m not trying to knock any small businesses just trying to let people know about what they have going on.

It’s possible that I have a chip on my shoulder. As someone who makes a living creating things, I’m immediately standoffish to anyone who bypasses the creative process for the sake of ease.

At the top of my list of favorite things about this world is the fact that we do a lot of the same things, yet we all somehow manage to have our own unique ways of doing them.

One of the things you strive for as a writer is to one day be able to develop a voice so unique to yourself that a reader can recognize your work before being told it’s yours. Whether I’ve achieved that and the quality to which I have are both debatable and not for me to decide.

There’s also a fear in the back of my mind always that there could come a day when an AI software is doing my job, so I hope and pray every day that never happens.

AI will undoubtedly become more prevalent in our lives. There are things that it can accomplish that are great; medical breakthroughs come to mind. Let’s not allow it to take away what makes life great.

Planet Purple seemed exciting and easy at first, but even the ones who lived there learned to appreciate difference and the downfalls of a uniform world.

May we never lose sight of the value of uniquity and human creativity. May we always strive to the be the green spaceship on a an entirely purple planet.