Authenticity in the Age of AI: Why trust and brand discipline matter more than ever

Welcome to the era of AI slop 

Scroll through social media and you’ll notice it’s become increasingly hard to tell what’s been produced by a person and what’s been churned out through a machine. According to Hubspot, 80% of marketers currently use AI for content creation, and 75% for media production (HubSpot State of Marketing Report, 2026). (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics) AI tools such as Sora, OpenAI and Gemini are everywhere. Fast, powerful and frictionless.

That’s the opportunity. And the risk.

AI has democratised creativity, but when the foundations aren’t right, brands don’t scale excellence, they scale confusion. Speed without control is chaos. Without clear positioning, narrative and governance, AI accelerates the wrong things: repetition instead of relevance, volume instead of meaning, polish instead of credibility. 

This is what people are calling AI slop: content that looks competent but feels empty, interchangeable and attention-hungry. For B2B and listed companies, this isn’t just a creative problem, it’s a reputational one. 

When everything looks AI generated, trust becomes the advantage 

AI is advancing so quickly that we’re approaching a point where audiences can no longer reliably tell what’s real and what’s generated. That changes how trust works.

When everything could be synthetic, skepticism becomes the default. Volume stops being the advantage. Trust does. 

Most audiences accept that brands use AI. What they don’t accept is feeling misled. People are becoming increasingly good at spotting content that feels automated, generic or overly polished. The risk isn’t looking innovative, it’s looking careless, inauthentic or indistinguishable from the noise.

In this environment, credibility doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from intent, transparency and judgement. Whether AI strengthens or erodes trust depends on how thoughtfully it’s used and whether brands understand the difference between scaling content and earning belief.

Authenticity is becoming harder to fake and easier to prove 

One of the most interesting shifts happening right now is aesthetic. As Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, has observed, “we’re moving away from a world where polished, professional-looking content signals quality towards one where it signals the opposite” .In a world where AI can generate flawless imagery: 

• Perfection becomes cheap
• Professionalism becomes suspicious
• Polish becomes a tell

The content people trust increasingly looks unproduced: blurry photos, shaky videos, imperfect moments. What Mosseri describes as the “raw aesthetic”, not as a trend, but as proof. Rawness is no longer just a style choice. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it isn’t perfect. 

For brands, this is uncomfortable territory, especially in B2B, where authority has traditionally been signalled through control and refinement. But the lesson is clear: credibility now outranks polish. 

Authenticity 3.0: real, intentional, governed 

We’ve lived through two eras of authenticity: 

1. Polished perfection
2. Raw, unfiltered “realness”

Neither works in an AI-saturated world. What audiences now want is something more grown-up:
real, intentional and accountable communication. Authenticity 3.0 isn’t about showing everything or automating everything. It’s about owning what you put into the world and being clear about how it was made. That requires structure, not just tone of voice.