AI Today: What an AI label costs an advert
Most people cannot spot an AI-made advert. Tell them, and it stops working as well. New York now makes some brands tell them anyway.
On 8 October, Apple's head of marketing posted a 17-second video of a pair of hands stitching the company's old rainbow logo into an embroidery hoop, one stripe at a time. It was the invitation to Apple's "Welcome home" launch. Fortune read it this week as a lesson about advertising in an age of AI-made content.
AI Today is a series from Fíor, a natural language classifier that predicts whether a piece of text was more likely written by a person or by AI. Each piece explains one development in AI and shows where the claims come from.
Showing the hands is the point. Most people cannot tell an AI-made advert from one made by people. When Ipsos and Syracuse University showed 20 adverts to 3,000 Americans, half of them made with AI, only a quarter of those who saw an AI one were even somewhat confident that it was AI.
They still preferred the human ones. On Ipsos's own models, the human-made adverts came out 14% stronger on likely short-term sales and 17% stronger on long-term brand health. That is a prediction from one study of 20 adverts, published in May, not a sales figure.
It does not hold everywhere. A field study led by NYU Stern ran fully AI-made image adverts against ones made by human experts. The AI versions drew up to 19% more clicks.
Where the cost sits
The same NYU study found it. Telling people an advert was made with AI cut its effectiveness by up to 31.5%.
Ask people directly and they say much the same. In this year's Bentley University and Gallup survey, 79% of Americans said they had seen adverts in the past month that looked AI-made. Sixty-two percent said using AI to create people or voices in adverts is unacceptable, even when the business discloses it. Among under-30s it was 73%. Help with ideas and early drafts was a different matter: 75% were fine with that.
So an advertiser using AI has a plain reason to stay quiet about it.
New York has taken that choice away for one kind of advert. Since 9 June, adverts in the state that use an AI-generated "synthetic performer", a person who does not exist, must say so clearly. A first violation costs $1,000, and later ones $5,000 each.
The law covers people, not everything. A product shot or a voice-only radio spot can be made with AI and carry no label at all.
Apple's hoop is the other side of the same bet. If an AI label makes people trust an advert less, a pair of human hands on camera should make them trust it more. For now, the most convincing proof that a person made something is to film them making it.
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