The Real AI Question Is: What Does Your Brand Stand For?

The question of how we need to communicate the use of AI will soon answer itself. From August 2, 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act will apply: photorealistic AI-generated images must be clearly labelled as such. If someone stops scrolling and thinks an image could be a real photograph, they will have to be told. What consumers may previously have suspected will then be stated directly on every asset. Labelling will no longer be a matter of choice. It will be the law.

A Gartner study from March this year shows that 50 percent of surveyed US consumers prefer brands that do not use AI in customer-facing content. 68 percent regularly question the authenticity of the content they see.
Brands such as Aerie and Equinox have already responded with campaigns that explicitly position themselves against AI-generated content. Fitness network Equinox is setting real bodies against AI imagery with the claim: “Question everything but yourself.” iHeartMedia promises listeners content that is “Guaranteed human.”
In Europe, McDonald’s Netherlands paid a high price in December 2025: an AI-generated Christmas campaign was pulled after just three days following pressure from social media comments. The signals are becoming harder to ignore.

The Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions provides the structural explanation. When the same advertisement is presented once as “photographed” and once as “AI-generated,” consumers rate the AI version as less credible, less emotional and less memorable, even though the content is identical. What damages trust is not quality. It is origin.

But origin only becomes a problem when a brand has no clear sense of itself. When a brand knows what it stands for and what supports its promise, it can also answer whether AI fits that identity or not. What triggers resistance is not AI as a technology, but the indecision behind its use.

What we are currently seeing is a reaction against communication that has become detached from a human sender: against content without conviction, against promises without a face. AI is the trigger. The older problem is a lack of strategic clarity about what a brand is and from which belief it communicates.

AI deepens this problem in a less visible way. When everyone uses the same models, the same prompts and the same pipelines, they also end up with the same language. Brands without a clear position as their starting point become less credible through AI, and more interchangeable at the same time. That is the opposite of differentiation.

The decisive question concerns self-understanding: Who are you, which needs do you serve, and does AI contradict that promise?

For a fitness brand built on real trainers and authentic transformation, an AI-generated motivational video is a problem because it undermines the brand’s core promise. For a logistics brand that promises efficiency and reliability, AI-supported communication is not a contradiction. It is the logical extension of its value proposition.
Both positions can be coherent. What they cannot tolerate is the absence of a clear answer to the fundamental question.

A current example of what this looks like when a brand has answered that question: Jägermeister has just launched a new campaign based exclusively on real experiences from brand fans, accompanied by proof of authenticity that records where and when each scene took place. The brand does not make an explicit statement about AI. It has simply answered what it is, and drawn the consequences.

David Mattin, whose newsletter brought this topic to my attention, puts it well: “Both can be coherent, and successful, brand positionings. For any organisation, though, navigating all this means addressing an age old imperative. That is, strategic clarity. Specifically, you need clarity on what kind of organisation you are, and the deep human needs that you exist to serve.”

In other words: brands that first answer the question that has nothing to do with AI are better positioned than those forced to react to the backlash.

What agencies can do is advise on whether, and how, AI fits a brand profile. What they should not do is jump on every wave simply because everything now seems possible with AI. The anti-AI wave is also a wave. And an explicit position against AI can be just as wrong as a blind position in favour of it.

From August 2 onward, the answer to that question will appear on every asset.