Generative AI makes content quick and cheap to produce. But the research so far points to two risks for brands: AI tends to pull everyone's work towards the same ideas, and many people are wary of content they think a machine made. The danger isn't using AI. It's posts that stop looking and sounding like you.
Does AI make content more alike?
The clearest evidence comes from a 2024 experiment published in Science Advances. Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser asked 293 people in the UK to write short stories, some with story ideas from GPT-4 and some without. The writers who had AI ideas wrote stories that evaluators rated as more creative. But their stories were also more similar to each other.
In the authors' words: "With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced." Each piece gets better; the whole lot gets more alike.
It's one experiment, with eight-sentence stories rather than social posts, one AI model and writers who weren't professionals. But it describes something many marketers have noticed: when everyone uses the same tools in the same way, the results start to blur together. And changing tools may not help. A 2025 preprint (not yet peer reviewed) that compared 22 AI models found their answers to creativity tests were "much more similar to other LLM responses than human responses are to each other".
For a brand, that's the real risk. Distinctiveness is what makes people recognise you, and recognition is what makes them choose you. (More on that in Brand familiarity: why people buy from brands they know.)
How do people feel about brands using generative AI?
Warier than the hype suggests. In a Gartner survey of 1,539 US consumers, published in March 2026, half said they'd prefer to give their business to brands that don't use generative AI in what they show customers.
50%
of US consumers say they'd prefer to give their business to brands that don't use generative AI in consumer-facing messages, advertising and content.
The same survey found that 68% frequently wonder whether the content and information they see is real. And in a smaller Gartner survey published in June 2026, 49% of US consumers agreed that generative AI has made the quality of content worse.
49%
of US consumers agree that generative AI has made the quality of content available worse.
These are US figures, and they're what people say rather than what they do. But they point the same way as Getty Images' VisualGPS research, in which almost 90% of consumers across 25 countries said they want to know whether an image was made with AI. (Getty sells human-made pictures, so it has an interest in that answer, and the fieldwork ran from 2022 to 2023.)
Does AI-made advertising hurt branding?
Not always, but it can. Kantar, which tests ads for brands, looked at hundreds of ads in its database that used generative AI in some way. On average they scored lower on branding, its measure of how well people link an ad to the brand behind it. Ads where the AI was used seamlessly did much better, with over 40% of them in the top tier for branded cut-through. It isn't AI itself that hurts; it's AI that's obvious.
NielsenIQ found something similar in a study of more than 2,000 people in 2024. Viewers spotted most of the AI-generated ads and found them less engaging. Even the AI ads rated as high quality produced weaker memory activation in the brain than traditional ads did.
To be fair to AI, plenty of people aren't bothered. Kantar's own figures show that only 41% of consumers say AI-generated ads bother them. Both studies are vendor research on ads rather than social posts, too. The lesson isn't to avoid AI; it's that people notice when content feels generic, and generic doesn't get remembered.
The risk is sameness, not the tool
Put together, the research says something simple. AI makes it easy to produce a lot of content that looks like a lot of other content. In a feed full of that, the brands that stand out are the ones you can recognise at a glance.
Gartner's analyst Kate Muhl put it well: "In a more skeptical media environment, brands need to be more recognizable, more credible and more intentional about the contexts in which they appear."
How to use AI without diluting your brand
- Lock the look. Let AI help with ideas and first drafts if it's useful, but keep your fonts, colours, logo and layouts fixed. The words can change; the brand shouldn't.
- Edit for your voice. Treat AI copy as a starting point. If it could have come from any brand, rewrite it until it could only have come from yours.
- Use real pictures where trust matters. Your own people, products and places do more for credibility than stock that looks like everyone else's, generated or not.
- Be open about AI images. If you do use them, say so. Most people want to know.
- Check for sameness. Cover your logo and ask: would anyone still know this was us?
That first step is what BrandStudio is for. We build your guidelines into templates with the brand fixed in place, so whatever words your team writes, with AI or without, the post still looks unmistakably like you. Try the live demo to see how it works, or see how it compares in BrandStudio vs Canva.
In short
- AI-assisted stories were rated more creative but were more alike (Doshi and Hauser, Science Advances, 2024).
- Half of US consumers say they'd prefer brands that don't use generative AI in customer-facing content (Gartner, 2026).
- Ads with obvious AI use scored lower on branding on average; seamless use did better (Kantar, 2025).
- The risk isn't AI; it's looking like everyone else. Keep the brand locked and the voice your own.
Questions
Is AI-generated content bad for brands?
Not in itself. The risk is sameness. In a 2024 Science Advances experiment, stories written with AI ideas were rated more creative but were more similar to each other, and Kantar found ads with obvious AI use scored lower on branding on average, while ads that used it seamlessly did better.
Do consumers trust AI-generated content?
Many are wary. In a Gartner survey of 1,539 US consumers published in March 2026, 50% said they'd prefer to give their business to brands that don't use generative AI in consumer-facing content, and 68% said they frequently wonder whether the content they see is real.
How can brands use AI without losing their identity?
Keep the brand fixed and let AI help only with ideas and drafts: lock your fonts, colours, logo and layouts in templates, edit AI copy into your own voice, use real pictures where trust matters, and be open about AI images.