Uncategorised When Globalisation Becomes An Imposed “New-Norm”: How Does It Change The Way We Do Strategy
Tue 10, 2026
Digital Marketing
Integrated use of AI in media: are we betraying our audiences?
By Oratile Modiragale
We find ourselves in the midst of the rapid technological advancements of Fourth Industrial Revolution where the biological, digital and physical worlds have blended. With this, the use of AI becomes weaved into our daily lives in more ways than we had anticipated.
Many individuals and businesses had come to a split point of either embracing this new technology, fearing and almost ‘abstaining’ from its use completely or being completely excited about the powerful tool they now had access to.
The media space was faced with the challenge of either fully taking on this new tool in full strides or fearing the threat it poses to creativity, credible information and cognitive bias. The brands and companies have progressed, increasingly adopting the software into its content. While this is an efficient and innovative way to generate content pieces to the exact specifications desired, we have to ask how this affects the people we speak to? Our audiences, the consumer of this media.
As we come to close the 2025 year, we have observed a growing audience segment that reports a sense of ‘technological betrayal’ from brands and companies that have utilized AI in media. There has been a reported 13% of consumers who have felt that they could trust advertisements that were completely created by AI which, surged to 48% when they had the sense that there is a human element in the mix. This has brought me to think about how much of the benefit of artificial intelligence is our audience seeing in its use in media and do brands actually receive the best value in the long run in a space that seeks out authenticity from brands.
Consumers seek out authenticity as a measure of investment in them from a brand. The idea that a copywriter sweat over every word or the handcrafted visual from an art director that took weeks to get right, communicates to the audience was that they’re ‘worth the effort.’ When this is swapped out for generative AI content, the messaging often backfires with the content being viewed as lazy. The audience asks themselves: ‘If they didn’t care enough to make this themselves, why should I?” This if often where I have seen brands lose their audience.
The betrayal often stems from a lack of transparency where some of the audiences don’t necessarily hate the technology but hate being duped into thinking that they are interacting with something real. This ‘betrayal’ compounds faster than the trust being built and when brands insist on synthetic mimicry, there is a risk posed to lose an audience that was willing to engage.
Artificial intelligence aims to make us feel seen through its hyper-personalization but has instead left a gap where this could be possible by using predictive algorithms to target audiences that has unfortunately missed the mark leaving them feeling like brands still don’t get them. When this happens there’s often a sense of invasion from AI that is felt by the consumer rather than the intended helpfulness.
I do believe that due to this rising trend in the usage of artificial intelligence in media, we will be seeing more of the absence of AI in media as a distinguisher amongst brands where a human only approach will be seen and felt as a status symbol. It is interesting to see how this will play out in the media landscape.
