When Everything Looks Like AI, Being Real Becomes the Advantage

Cookware brand Le Creuset paid a digital video artist to spend days shooting and hand-editing footage frame by frame. When the video went live, the comments asked one question: Is this artificial intelligence (AI)? Le Creuset replied it was not in the comments, and some viewers still did not believe it.

That is the market brands are now selling into. Generative AI content makes up roughly 57% of all online material, according to TechCrunch. A Gartner survey of 1,539 U.S. consumers found that 68% frequently question whether what they see online is real, and half would rather buy from brands that avoid generative AI in marketing. Brands across apparel, baby products, cookware and beauty are now treating human-made content as a differentiator.

The Feed Nobody Wanted

Pinterest built its business on curated visual discovery. By 2025, users searching for recipes or home décor were hitting synthetic images that linked to ad-stuffed sites with nothing real behind them, as reported by CNN. In October, the platform added controls that let users filter AI content by categories including beauty, fashion and home décor. The tools arrived after months of complaints from its users.

Brand campaigns suffered similar damage. McDonald’s Netherlands pulled a Christmas ad after AI production drew viewer backlash. Similarly, Coca-Cola faced criticism for AI-generated holiday visuals.

“In the past six months, there’s been such an uptick of comments on any video I do, like, ‘Is this AI or AI slop?’” Le Creuset’s video artist Ian Padgham told the Wall Street Journal. By end of 2025, only 27% of U.S. consumers said they judge whether something is true by instinct, per Gartner. Suspicion now falls on real work as readily as synthetic work.

Pledges Over Disclaimers

The brands are responding by making public commitments. In October, Aerie pledged never to use AI to generate or alter images of people in its content, building on its 2014 no-retouching promise. CMO Stacey McCormick told the Wall Street Journal the brand’s identity is built around not changing a person.

A spring campaign featuring actress Pamela Anderson, showing a chatbot generating models before revealing they were real people, became Aerie’s most-liked Instagram post. Q4 2025 sales rose 23% year-over-year, according to DesignRush.

Baby products brand Coterie told followers it would keep AI-generated images entirely out of its social media marketing. CEO Jess Jacobs said the brand would never use AI to replace the human moments that define it, according to the Wall Street Journal. Subscriber retention is 98% month over month.

Dove made the same call in April 2024, becoming the first beauty brand to publicly commit never to use AI to create or distort images of women in advertising, backed by a global study of 33,000 respondents across 20 countries, as reported by DesignRush.

LEGO’s World Cup campaign featuring soccer stars Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, and Vinícius Jr. carried the hashtag #HonestlyItsNotAI. Even productions with recognizable human faces now need a label to be believed.

Where AI Still Fits

None of these brands have stopped using AI entirely. Aerie uses it for post-production tasks such as lighting. Jacobs said AI improves Coterie’s customer experience and operational efficiency in many ways. The pledge is narrower: human craft for the content that drives purchase decisions and earns repeat business.

California Management Review found that perceived authenticity depends on three factors — information credibility, disclosure transparency and reputation trust. When all three hold, positive outcomes occur 82% of the time. That combination appeared in fewer than 9% of the cases the publication studied.

“Marketers should treat GenAI as a trust decision as much as a technology decision,” said Emily Weiss, senior principal analyst in Gartner’s marketing practice.

The push for transparency is now influencing both corporate strategy and public policy. New York’s law requiring disclosure of AI-generated humans in marketing takes effect in June, the first such statute in the U.S.

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