AI Made the Ad

And Somehow That Had Me Thinking About Sincerity

Unless you've been building a hut on a deserted island with zero WiFi and zero FOMO, AI has landed in your world. Hard and fast.

I'm not going to pretend... I love generative AI. I use it every day, in my comms, my research, even figuring out what phone to buy. I am a communications person who uses AI to communicate better and I'm not ashamed to say it.

But here's the moment that had me pause...

I was watching TV (yes, actual TV, ads and all) and a commercial came on that was completely AI-generated. No cast. No crew. Just… AI doing its thing.

And I had two thoughts:

One, I could tell. And two, did it actually matter that I could tell? Did that change how I felt about the brand?

These are the questions I can't shake. Because brand has always been about feeling. The trust that builds over time between a brand and its faithful audience. And now we're in a world where the thing creating that feeling… might not have felt anything at all.

Here's where it gets interesting for me as a brand nerd: AI isn't just disrupting how ads get made. It's disrupting the meaning of authenticity itself. And I don't think we've fully caught up with what that means.

Because if a brand's values are real, if the intent behind the message is genuine, does it matter that AI wrote the script? Or is the human behind the prompt the new creative director?

Authenticity got complicated before AI became a household name.

Somewhere in the last decade, brands learned to communicate with armour on. Like when every brand slaps a rainbow on their logo in June and going quiet in July. Or when Lululemon runs a "Be Planet" sustainability campaign while their carbon emissions quietly climb.

We got so good at performing authenticity that we forgot what the real thing felt like. Audiences noticed. Consumers, particularly younger ones, have developed what one researcher brilliantly called "bullshit detection capital." They don't just hear what a brand says. They audit it.

And in doing that, we traded something real for something polished.

AI didn't create that problem. It just makes it impossible to ignore anymore.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Because I don't think the AI question and the authenticity question are separate conversations. I think they're the same one.

And what they're both pointing to is sincerity.

Not authenticity, that word has been workshopped to death, like synergy, holistic and agile. Sincerity. The slightly messier, younger sometimes-embarrassing sibling. Sincerity, the art of actually meaning what you say and saying it out loud without immediately cushioning it with a disclaimer or tiptoeing around the complexity.

Something is shifting. After years of ironic detachment and curated everything, caring out loud is starting to feel relevant again. Audiences aren’t looking for clever. They're looking for real and genuine.

This is a cultural shift. And it's happening at exactly the same moment AI enters, not just the room, but the entire neighbourhood.

So what does that mean for brands?

It means the gap between AI-generated and human-generated content is going to matter less and less, technically. AI will get better. The ads will get harder to spot. The copy will get cleaner.

But the gap in sincerity is going to matter more and more.

Because AI can produce authentic-sounding content all day long. It can mirror your brand voice, hit your tone, tick every box in your style guide. What it cannot do, yet, maybe ever, is actually mean it. It cannot have a conviction. It cannot be brave. It cannot choose to say the uncomfortable true thing when the comfortable vague thing was right there.

That's a human job. And right now, most organisations are outsourcing that job too, not to AI, but to caution. To consensus. To "let's just say something everyone can agree on and not rock the boat.”

The brands that are going to excel in this next chapter aren't the ones who use AI the best, although that’s helpful, the brands that excel are the ones brave enough to be sincere. To say what they actually mean. To stand behind it without the “bullshit” as protection.

Being frank, literally, as a strategy.

I'm still working all of this out. I don't have tidy conclusions. But I'm excited, genuinely, slightly embarrassingly excited, about where these questions go. More to come.