What’s real? That’s the question everybody’s asking these days. Artificial intelligence, or more specifically, generative AI has blurred the lines to such a degree, that most of us have no clue if the events we see on our social media feeds actually happened, if the person telling us a story really exists, or if that painting we liked was made by an artist or an algorithm.

AI has engendered a terrible landscape where we cannot trust our own senses. A place that forces us to think twice before making a decision about what’s in front of us, and every encounter leaves us with lingering doubt. It freezes us in place and strips us of our agency. In the time it takes us to decide if the tiger is real or not, it has already devoured us.

So, what value could such a technology possibly have in the fields of branding and advertising, where the entire point is to build trust? There is no going back for generative AI. It has sealed its reputation as a spurious, unethical and environmentally catastrophic tool for thieves and wannabes. AI’s brand is in tatters and no one will be able to change that fact until the billionaire troglodytes who unleashed it on us are forgotten by history.

At this stage, it doesn’t matter how good your AI prompt game is. It’s irrelevant how well you’ve spec’d out the psych profiles of your target market before submitting your directions to the model, and it makes no difference how visually stunning your output seems. Any whiff of AI will doom your campaign for all eternity. Nobody will buy what you’re selling once they identify the hand of the machine, because it will make them doubt themselves.

“Is it real?” has become the first question a brand will have to answer before it has any chance at building consumer loyalty and brand equity. Authenticity is the new oil, and if you are an agency that’s going all in on AI, the best thing you can do now is apologize. The question is: Will anybody believe you?