It’s no mystery that marketing is entirely immersed in AI nowadays. It’s nearly impossible to find a team that isn’t using it in some form, which begs a question that brands are afraid of answering:
Is it possible to be authentic anymore?
Marketers tend to treat authenticity like a light switch; either something's real or it's not. The truth is, it's always been a little messier than that. Now, we have AI exposing exactly how messy the process is. Here's the thing though: the problem has never been the tool. It's whether a brand actually knows itself well enough to use that tool without shooting itself in the foot.
This discussion between Bryan and Josh explores brand relationships, the importance of trust in different purchases, and the shift towards raw, imperfect content. If you want to learn about successful and failed uses of AI, the importance of staying true to brand values, and future legal considerations, you’ll want to tune into this one.
🎥 Watch the episode on YouTube
What "Authentic" Actually Means Now
Authenticity used to be a pretty literal idea. Did this document come from who it says it came from? That's it, that's the whole test. Over time, it got more brand-specific, focusing on whether or not the content was cohesive with the brand’s voice and messaging. But AI has raised the stakes by adding on a third layer. Something can come from the brand, sound like the brand, and still feel fake.
Trust Is What's Actually on the Line
Here's why any of this matters. Trust is built on authenticity, but trust doesn't always carry the same weight. It depends on the product you’re buying. For example, nobody agonizes over a buying a whiteboard marker. You’re not researching the brand worried about whether or not it’s a good fit for you. Your relationship with it is low-stakes, and it’s quick to move on from. But a brand you actually feel connected to, such as a clothing brand or anything tied to identity, that's an entirely different story. Betraying that trust is a lot harder to shrug off. It's a much bigger deal, and that's exactly where a bad AI decision tends to do the most damage.
When AI Backfires: Two Real Examples
Everyone remembers the Coca-Cola AI-generated Christmas ad, and not for good reasons. The brand took its most iconic asset, the polar bears, and rebuilt the whole thing with AI. People instantly hated it. But the problem wasn't that the animals were fake. Nobody's ever had an issue with animated polar bears. It was that it looked cheap. Coke's entire identity runs on craftsmanship and innovation, and this looked like every other AI ad out there.
That's a quality violation, not authenticity.
Sports Illustrated is a darker version of the same story. They published product reviews under AI-generated author profiles, pretending that real people wrote them. That, on the other hand, is not a quality miss. That's just clear deception, and it damaged a brand that had spent decades building its credibility.
Both examples point at the same thing: being "on brand" and being "authentic" are two different tests, and AI can pass one while failing the other.
The Avatar Problem, and Why Context Changes Everything
Not every use of AI carries the same risk, and this is where a lot of brands overcorrect in one direction or the other.
Public-facing, persuasive content is the danger zone. An AI avatar trying to sell you something, pretending to be a real person giving you a genuine recommendation, is where trust takes the biggest hit. You might not even be able to pin point what's wrong with it. Something about the pacing feels off, the eye contact holds a beat too long, and suddenly you feel sold to instead of spoken to.
Internal use is a totally different animal. Nobody's fooled by an onboarding video using an AI voiceover, because nobody's pretending it's something it's not. And there's a real upside: you can update an HR training video in an afternoon instead of reshooting the whole thing.
Then there's the gray area. Using AI to patch 15 seconds of corrupted footage, in a person's actual voice, is technically just restoring something real. But if nobody discloses it, it can still land as inauthentic to someone who finds out later. Perception does a lot of the work here, not just technical accuracy.
If you need one rule to hold onto: don't let a robot pretend to be a human. And take the stakes seriously, because even when people can't detect AI in the moment, learning about it after the fact will tank trust.
So What Do You Actually Do About It?
A few things hold up better than any rigid rulebook.
1. Know your brand before you try to judge anything else.
You can't tell whether a piece of AI content is "off brand" if you don't have a clear, specific sense of what your brand would and wouldn't say. When you skip that step, every decision turns into a subjective argument nobody wins.
2. Resist the urge to overcorrect.
Swinging hard into manufactured rawness by creating deliberately messy content just to prove you're ‘authentic’ is its own kind of fake.
3. When you screw up, and you will, own it.
Letting influencers speak in their own words instead of scripting every syllable, or just admitting a mistake instead of quietly deleting it, builds more trust than pretending ever could. People trust brands the way they trust people. Not because they never mess up, but because of how they recover.
The brands that come out ahead over the next few years won't be the ones with the flashiest AI stack. They'll be the ones who figure out how to use AI in service of human connection instead of as a replacement for it. There's already a countertrend building. Brands are winning specifically by leaning into nostalgia and imperfection instead of chasing polish.
Want your content to feel authentic, even if AI is part of the process? Contact us to explore how we can help.
