A large-scale study shows why perceived artificiality may be the new creative risk.
We’ve all become familiar with AI slop: low-quality content that is so obviously created by AI that we can’t believe it could fool anyone. But more and more, we seem to be confronted with the unsettling possibility that we’re not sure whether what we’re looking at is AI-generated or not. That uncertainty is the starting point for “AI in Disguise—Quasi-Experimental Analysis of a Large-Scale Deployment of AI-Generated Ads,” co-written by HBS AI Institute Frontier Firm affiliate Shunyuan Zhang. She and her co-authors asked what happens when AI-generated visual content enters a real advertising marketplace without being labeled as AI. Do people click less, or more? The result is more nuanced than either AI boosters or skeptics might expect.
Why This Matters
For advertisers, the research suggests treating perceived artificiality as a creative risk and avoiding visual cues that make an ad feel overly machine-made. The same logic applies across organizational functions. In customer service, AI responses may succeed or fail depending on whether customers experience them as natural rather than synthetic. In product design, teams should ask whether AI-generated concepts are realistic and actually useful, not just novel. For business leaders and executives, the takeaway is that AI value can depend on perception. Organizations that can build feedback loops to test how AI outputs are received, not just how cheaply they are produced, will be better positioned to turn AI into a source of strategic advantage.
Link to the HBS AI Institute Insight Article
Link to the Research Paper
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