I have two issues – firstly, brands are cannibalising their own customer base in the name of cost optimisation and secondly, in the process, they’re doing untold damage to an entire creative ecosystem.
By replacing real people in advertising with AI-generated faces and voices, companies aren’t just cutting production costs, they’re engaging in profit hoarding that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of who it is that keeps them in business.
There’s a place for AI, but it should be applied in research, automation and igniting ideas – the ‘grunt work’, rather than producing the finished work.
Every real person eliminated from the creative process means one fewer paycheque in the economy, one less tax payment to fund infrastructure development (ok, corruption, too) - and way more than one fewer consumer with purchasing power, because of the multiplier effect driven by the need to sustain direct and indirect families.
This is not a creative industry problem – it’s one faced by workforces across sectors where automation is slashing jobs.
Based on projections from Forrester Research, AI is set to significantly alter the landscape of advertising, with 7.5% of agency jobs (roughly 33,000 roles) in the US alone expected to be replaced by 2030.
The overreliance on AI isn’t innovation; it’s extraction.
When brands deliberately use AI to avoid paying models, actors and creators, they’re not reinvesting those savings into better products or lowering prices for their customers; they’re simply pocketing the difference while systematically dismantling the economic ecosystem that sustains them.
The drive for short-term profit margins is creating long-term economic suicide.
But beyond the economics, there’s a deeper betrayal happening.
Advertising has always operated on that basic premise of relatability.
Here’s a TVC or a billboard featuring a person like you, living a life you might want, enjoying something you might enjoy too – so why don’t you go out and try it?
AI-generated people destroy that contract entirely.
You can’t see yourself in something that was never human – because it has as much humanity behind it as the brand that cut creative humans out of the equation.
SmythOS research tells us that “about 62% of consumers are less likely to engage with or trust content on social media if they know it was generated using AI, while 20% deem AI-generated social media posts untrustworthy”.
Nobody has ever aspired to be an algorithm and, in a world where digital targeting and social media have inspired people to find their own unique niches and, by extension, their tribe, bland AI messaging – not because it’s crude, but because it’s just too polished and generic – brands who remove the humanity from the work they put out into the world cannot win the trust of their audience.
Token digital representation without intentional, brand-defining representation is just sleight of hand.
Brands can twiddle the demographic dials to produce something – it’ll never be ‘someone’ – who they think will represent their brand, without ever actually hiring, paying, or platforming anyone from those communities. It’s inauthentic, it’s unappealing, it’s ineffective – and it’s inhumane.
Brands which outsource creative ‘thought’, production and distribution to AI are handing over control of their brands to something that is – and it’s in the name – artificial.
They’re eliminating authenticity, relatability and hard-to-cultivate genuine human connection and switching to algorithm-friendly, compliant, synthetic ‘perfection’ that they assume will sell.
People are complex and, at the end of the day, it’s the people who buy the brand’s products.
Show me the LLM buying your soft drink or your burger, or the machine learning model with a wallet and a craving, which spots creative that it feels in its code and acts on the stimulus it receives.
Until I see one of those things with humanity, curiosity, opinions, a history, loyalty and the ability to make decisions based on what it wants, rather than what it thinks it wants, then we can talk about whether humans still belong in your advertising.
Until then, remember: advertising to humans requires humans – and humanity.
