Two new studies shed light on how AI use and disclosure changes how people perceive ads, as well as the brands responsible for them.
The authors of Is that your best effort? How AI-use disclosure in digital advertising affects perceived effort and engagement, analysed the results of eight studies comprising data from Meta and experimental settings.
They found that AI disclosures encouraged people to perceive the ads as low-effort and assume that the product being advertised was low-quality. This led to a drop in engagement, with AI disclosures resulting in a 2.23 percentage-point drop in click-through rates.
The effect was stronger for ads promoting handmade products, but weaker when the ads emphasised the machine-driven efficiency of the brand or product.
A small pilot study, published the same day as the meta-analysis, looked at the complexities of how AI disclosures affect consumer perceptions.
In Trust Issues: AI Advertising Edition, researchers interviewed 18- to 30-year-olds about how different execution styles and AI disclosure methods in video ads influenced their feelings on the credibility of the brand. Overall, they found that using AI does not have a negative impact on trust, in and of itself, but that clumsy communication of AI use, or ads that felt to viewers like they lacked human presence, did negatively affect trust.
Consumers trusted ads that stated that they were ‘created with AI assistance and human supervision’ more than those which were ‘fully AI-generated’, finding the latter ‘cheap’ and ‘lazy’. Similarly, voices with a natural human pace and cadence were more trusted than faster or more robotic ones.
Consumers also responded positively to realistic ads with subtle AI enhancements, rather than those with very visible AI effects like super-saturated colours and mismatched lipsyncing.
According to Dr James Dunn, who published a paper on AI in the British Journal of Psychology in February, people are generally confident in their ability to spot an AI-generated face ‘even when that confidence wasn’t matched by their actual performance.’
Dunn’s research showed that ‘people with average face-recognition ability performed only slightly better than chance.’
While this may induce some brands to not disclose AI use in their advertising, more platforms now require AI disclosure, as laws catch up to new technologies, and that may cease to be an option for marketers.
The second study, then, may provide the safest route for brands. Brands that produce AI ads and disclose them can follow the suggestions laid out by researchers and be reasonably confident that consumers will not penalise the brand for using AI. Reframing AI disclosures to make clear that real human effort went into the marketing process, keeping ads simple and using AI for enhancement rather than generation and ensuring that the ads still use real (or realistic) human voices and faces wherever possible all go a long way to reducing the risks of AI disclosure.
Is that your best effort? How AI-use disclosure in digital advertising affects perceived effort and engagement by Ripinka Koli Patil and Dan Hamilton Rice was published in Journal of Business Research in June 2026.
Trust Issues: AI Advertising Edition by Anton Holmer, Elias Jisborg and Thor Rosquist was published by Linnaeus University in June 2026.
