Agreeable Gray Walls and the AI Race to the Middle

Somewhere in the early 2000s, color started leaving our walls. Us seventies and eighties kids were none too sad to see the avocado and teal of our childhoods drift out of favor. There are lots of theories for why this happened. The one that I think is as good as any was the proliferation of television shows about home remodeling and house flipping that flooded the airwaves during that period. Each week we’d tune in and see designers with brushes loaded up with light gray paint and realtors giving advice to hopeful flippers to go as neutral as possible.

In many ways the graying of America was good advice. It removed one variable if your goal was to recoup your investment. It wasn’t exciting, but it was good enough.

Then seemingly overnight, it became ubiquitous and all walls were gray. The paint companies dressed it up with names like Front Porch and, my personal favorite, Agreeable Gray. But we all knew what we were buying. Safe. Neutral. Designed to work with almost anything and offend almost no one. It worked. Then it worked too well and suddenly, nothing stood out.

I’m starting to think we’re painting our words Agreeable Gray.

With the help of AI, anyone can produce a passable piece of writing, an image or a presentation in seconds. Sometimes it's great. Usually, it's good enough.

But there's something that gets lost. AI doesn't just eliminate production time. The danger is letting it eliminate process. Writers and designers learn early that the first answer is rarely the interesting one. We sketch. We throw things away. We make wrong turns. We write horrible paragraphs that never make the final draft. Then out of that terrible draft we pull out one tiny idea that makes the next one better. We build on the backs of our what ifs.

What looks like inefficiency from the outside is often where the work earns its place. When the first answer is already good enough, it's awfully tempting to stop asking what if.

AI-generated words and images are everywhere.

Increasingly, everything is agreeable. Which means good enough isn’t good enough anymore. Just like those ubiquitous gray walls, competent, inoffensive work is becoming table stakes.

AI is raising the floor dramatically. But what is it doing to the ceiling?

I had a design professor that used to tell me, “If everything is screaming on the page, nothing is heard.” That was great advice when everyone was trying hard to stand out. I wonder what he would say if he landed in a world where everyone had decided to be agreeable and blend in?

So… what do we do as professionals? You can’t ignore AI. That feels like career suicide right now. I’ve seen that move before. When I was starting out, one of my primary tools was an X-Acto blade, not a mouse.

I had plenty of peers that chose to ignore desktop publishing. The same with writers who refused to change their typewriters for word processors. The people I knew who refused to incorporate the technology didn't fare particularly well. There were more designers after desktop publishing became the standard, they just didn’t always have the same faces. The ones who figured out how to use it eventually thrived. Desktop publishing didn't kill design. It killed a lot of the tasks we used to get paid to do as designers.

My advice is to learn to incorporate AI into your work, but don’t lose yourself in the exchange. Research? Brainstorming? Editing pass? Replace what you can replace and double-down on the things you can’t. Use some of the time AI gives back to ask more what ifs, not fewer.

Ask AI where the middle is. Then decide how far you're willing to move away from it. 

Be disagreeable.

Anyone who tells you they know exactly where this is going should make you suspicious. The evangelists will overpromise. The skeptics will underestimate. Companies will make stupid decisions in both directions. Eventually we'll stop talking about AI quite so much because it will simply become part of the infrastructure.

AI just is. It’s not good and it’s not evil. It’s up to you to make it a pencil instead of a god. I’m going to use it where it makes sense. And I’m going to protect the part of me that can’t be replaced. That’s what matters.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit here and think about how to do that while I stare at my gray walls.