June 10, 2026
Why audiences are getting harder on AI content
The McDonald’s Netherlands Christmas commercial went up on YouTube on December 6. Three days later, McDonald’s took it down. Viewers had spent the weekend calling it AI slop and creepy, with one commenter saying it was “the most god-awful ad I’ve seen this year.” The 45-second video was built almost entirely from generative AI clips. It was meant to capture the chaos of the holiday season. Instead it captured something the brand had not bargained for: an audience that has stopped giving AI content the benefit of the doubt.
For Ingrid Deon, founder of word-craft, a Yarmouth-based social media agency that builds organic content for consumer goods brands, the shift has been visible for months. In Episode 79 of All Hands on Tech, she described the mood swing in plain terms.
“It got icky really fast,” she told host Claire Quirion. “People are kind of shy to say they use AI, or they’re trying to cover it up. It’s not shiny anymore.”
The numbers are catching up to that observation. A January 2026 study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that 39 percent of Gen Z consumers feel “very or somewhat negative” about AI-generated ads. That’s nearly double the share of millennials, and almost twice as high as the 21 percent figure the same study recorded two years earlier. Thirty percent of those Gen Z respondents now describe brands using AI in advertising as inauthentic. Gartner’s separate March 2026 survey of 1,539 US consumers came in at a similar place: half said they would prefer to give their business to brands that don’t use generative AI in customer-facing messages, ads, or content. Klaviyo’s 2026 AI Consumer Trends Report adds another data point: 32 percent of consumers say AI-generated content makes them trust brands less, and roughly one in five report seeing low-quality or generic AI content from brands every week.
The McDonald’s incident wasn’t an outlier. Microsoft spent the opening days of January fielding what social media quickly named the “Microslop” backlash, after Satya Nadella’s blog post asked the industry to stop calling AI “slop” and start thinking of it as “bicycles for the mind.” The phrase did not land. By January 3, “Microslop” was trending on X. In fashion, H&M’s announcement that it would create AI digital twins of 30 of its models drew criticism over consent, compensation, and job displacement. Italian luxury house Valentino faced its own backlash for AI imagery critics labelled cheap and lazy. Even Coca-Cola, which has now run two AI-generated Christmas campaigns, has been getting mixed marks: positive sentiment held in some surveys, but creative directors and viewers continued to split sharply on the work.
But the deeper risk goes past the platform crackdown (though that is also real, with YouTube updating its monetization rules in July 2025 to clarify that mass-produced and repetitive content is ineligible for the Partner Program). It’s what poor AI content tells a customer about everything else a business does. On the podcast, the conversation landed on a small-business example: a restaurant posting an obviously AI-generated photo of its food.
“What else are they being lazy at? Are they being lazy when they’re making my donair?” Deon said.
That inference, from cheap content to cheap operations, is the trust cost most marketers underprice. Deloitte’s 2024 Connected Consumer Survey found that 70 percent of US adults familiar with generative AI agree the technology makes it harder to trust what they see online, and 68 percent are concerned that AI-generated content could be used to deceive or scam them. The skepticism has only sharpened since. Originality.ai’s 2025 Reddit study found that the share of likely AI-generated posts on the platform climbed from 13 percent in 2024 to roughly 15 percent the following year, and a companion analysis of marketing-adjacent subreddits found r/Content_marketing running closer to 46 percent. Reddit moderators have been adjusting their rules in response.
Audiences have also learned the tells. Sentences of similar length. Hyper-polished imagery. Generic references with no real names or places. Video clips that change every six to ten seconds, because that’s the upper limit of most generative tools before the output starts to distort. These are the markers people now scan for, often without realizing they are doing it.
The lesson Deon draws from her own work is counterintuitive. As AI floods feeds with synthetic content, the value of human-made work goes up rather than down. Her team uses AI heavily for ideation, brainstorming, and research. They write every final post by hand. The reason, she says, comes down to a quality the technology has not yet caught up with.
“AI always still kind of has a weird marker of dystopian voice,” she said. “I don’t even know how to describe it, but it’s very apparent.”
For brands working in 2026, the question is shifting. It’s no longer how fast to adopt AI. It’s where AI quietly serves the audience and where it begins to cost the trust the brand has spent years building.
To hear the full conversation, listen to All Hands on Tech Episode 79: Authenticity in the Age of AI, available wherever you get your podcasts.