Have you noticed AI-generated ads and brand posts on social media lately? Have you noticed the comments under those?
A year ago, AI advertising felt exciting and new, plus it had some novelty. Brands experimenting with it felt innovative, and there was a feeling of “oh wow, how is this even possible?” But from the time I started writing this piece to now (I won’t say how long), the reaction has moved from something close to blanket rejection into something far more nuanced, and honestly, into one of the more interesting digital marketing trends worth watching right now.
There are roughly three camps. Some have simply normalised it: AI is here, content is content, “I don’t care,” move on. Then there are the purists who will never budge, though honestly they’re a niche. And then there’s the biggest, most interesting group: people with no fixed opinion at all. Their reaction depends entirely on which brand is doing it and how good it actually looks.
That third group is where things get interesting, because they’re not really asking “was AI used.” They’re asking something closer to “what did you do with it.” A tier-1 brand cutting corners with AI visuals gets judged very differently from a smaller brand doing the same thing. Quality and brand equity have become the two variables that decide whether AI content gets a pass or a pile-on.
That’s the real shift in AI marketing right now. Audiences haven’t collectively decided AI advertising is acceptable or unacceptable. They’ve stopped judging the technology and started judging the decision behind it.
Which makes sense once you consider why brands jumped on AI in the first place. There are plenty of sophisticated-sounding reasons, innovation, cost efficiency, speed, but if we’re being honest, the loudest reason was much simpler than any of that. It became a trend, and it looked easy. That’s usually enough to move an entire industry without anyone asking too many questions. Whether it actually made the job easier is a whole other conversation.
Which changes the economics of the whole thing. When anyone can generate a hundred visuals in an afternoon, the visuals themselves stop being the valuable part. What’s left, the idea, the taste, the cultural read, the brand identity, the intention behind why this and not something else, matters more, not less. AI hasn’t lowered the bar for creative work. It’s raised it, quietly, by removing the excuse of production difficulty.
There’s a good example of this playing out. I remember an ad from Rapido, made entirely with generative AI, timed around the release of the film The Odyssey. The comments weren’t the usual pile-on, the “AI slop” callout that’s become almost automatic online. People were appreciative. Which raised a question worth sitting with: why does fantasy, obviously-not-real AI content get a pass, while a brand running an AI-generated video of a family celebrating Holi gets torn apart in the comments for feeling hollow? Same technology, completely different reception.
The Rapido ad leaned into fantasy, stylised, clearly-not-real visuals, so nobody expected it to look authentic in the first place. The Holi ad tried to fake something real, a family, a festival, a feeling, and audiences could tell the intention wasn’t there. It wasn’t the AI that failed. It was the decision to point AI at something that needed a human hand. That’s a pretty clean example of how AI-generated content in marketing succeeds when the intention behind it is visible, and fails the moment it isn’t.
This isn’t only an advertising problem either. Why is there collective pushback from Hollywood producers and actors, with movies proudly claiming “no AI was used” in production? Partly because AI is turning into a signal, not always a fair one, for reduced effort and lower production value. It’s a bit like how luxury brands took a hit when rumours spread that certain high-end products were being manufactured in China. The parallel isn’t exact, cost of manufacturing and cost of creative labour aren’t the same thing, but the instinct behind both reactions is similar: when people suspect something was made the easy way, they discount it before they’ve properly judged the quality.
None of this means the craft is disappearing though. It’s moving. Photography got easier. Digital editing got easier. Music production got easier. In every case, the skill didn’t vanish, it relocated, from operating the tool to knowing what’s worth making with it in the first place. That’s the deeper story sitting underneath artificial intelligence in marketing right now. The craft is shifting away from producing the asset and toward knowing what should exist at all, and being able to tell a good use of AI apart from a lazy one.
That’s really the whole argument, and probably the clearest answer to how AI is changing advertising right now. It didn’t make creativity less important. It made the gap between creativity and production nearly impossible to hide.
Some teams have started treating AI less like a tool and more like a campaign generator, prompt in, campaign out. Well, why not? It creates a plethora of options that would otherwise take a lot of time. That’s AI content creation in its rawest form, and it’s tempting, and it’ll only get more tempting as the tools improve. But the brands that navigate this well won’t be the ones avoiding AI, and they won’t be the ones letting it run the whole show either. They’ll be the ones using it exactly where it’s useful, research, iteration, speed, while keeping a human hand on the parts that require judgment, taste, and actually knowing their audience.
Because craft was never really about how hard something was to make. It’s about whether someone made a real decision. And audiences can tell the difference almost instantly.
“Streak helped us listen to the market and respond with positioning that hit the mark. Buland became a hit from day one.”
Your work must be a lot easier now.” A sarcastic grin or a censored explanation?