It was a bad week for AI’s public image. The concept was booed on mention at several commencement speeches, tarnished a literary prize, drove more layoffs, and tangled local politics in a number of data-center squabbles. A hyped new book about AI’s impact on “truth” was dragged for including fake quotes made up by AI. Pope Leo XIV’s forthcoming encyclical will concern “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” Vatican News reported.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen something intensify this quickly,” mused one of the researchers behind a recent poll from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, finding less than half of Americans think the country should charge ahead with AI innovation.
Inevitably, this backlash-y skepticism threatens to ding big brands that, fairly or not, seem complicit in AI’s increasing ubiquity. This isn’t just a potential problem for the leading AI companies themselves (which haven’t been doing a great job of making a case for the technology’s upsides). The risk is now wider, potentially touching any brand seen using AI in dubious ways. In fact, this week also brought a small but telling example that hints at what the emerging AI-skeptical zeitgeist might portend.
In a fairly innocuous post on X touting its association with Italian tennis champion Jannik Sinner, Nike wrote that the tennis superstar “can do it all,” adding, “This isn’t just history — it’s his story in the making.” Referring to the “it isn’t y, it’s z” construction, a trope of AI writing, an X user groused: “they let a GPT AI-ism through on the main Nike page?? I thought marketing teams caught this stuff by now.” This was just conjecture, and not all that convincing (writers have been using this construction long before AI), but it sparked hundreds of responses.
This likely says more about the public mood than about Nike. (Nike did not respond to a request for comment.) When ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned AI in his speech to graduates of the University of Arizona, he was rewarded with a hail of boos. Soldiering on, Schmidt argued that to behave as if a grim AI future is inevitable is “surrendering your agency.”
But obviously the forceful jeering is the agency, or at least a big part of it. Complaining, calling out fakery, demonizing AI as inauthentic: These are the everyday weapons of the consumer marketplace. If anything makes you want to pick on—or shun—a particular company, it’s that company seemingly outsourcing its core identity messaging to a galaxy-brain robot. Brands are particularly vulnerable to charges of inauthenticity, and AI is currently an inauthenticity force multiplier.
This challenge didn’t start this week: The controversy around a 2024 Apple iPad ad depicting all manner of creative tools being crushed, in effect by edgy tech like AI, was an early example of a brand seeming to betray its own roots; Apple apologized. But clearly the stakes have only gotten higher as AI’s societal influence has become more pronounced.
Some brands have explicitly staked out non-AI positions, in the tradition of products declaring non-GMO status, or promising fair trade practices or natural ingredients. Radio and podcast giant iHeartMedia uses the slogan “Guaranteed Human” as part of a brand pledge not to use AI-generated personalities or music. Apparel brand Aerie has promised not to use AI-built images in its marketing; “In an industry where everything is generated, realness becomes special,” its CMO said recently. Dove has a similar commitment. Polaroid has promoted its pro-analog message with explicitly anti-AI marketing.
That said, at this point no amount of pushback is going to reverse the forward march of AI in general (no matter what Eric Schmidt tells college students about their agency). And as the technology threads its way into the culture at large and business in particular, it’s going to get tougher to live up to any claim of being AI-free, official or otherwise. It may turn out the only thing worse than a brand that relies on AI is one that resorts to that all-too-human practice: not really committing to avoid it, and trying to hide in the murky middle.
