Cheap AI-generated content is starting to hurt marketing. More than half of consumers trust brands less because of it

On September 22, Gartner published a survey of 1,006 US consumers conducted in May and June 2026. The results capture one of the first clearer signs of resistance to the mass production of marketing content with AI. Sixty-five percent of respondents believe brands create too much such content. Fifty-seven percent said its spread had reduced their trust in brands’ marketing messages. For marketing leaders, the mechanism behind this problem matters. Generative tools dramatically reduce the marginal cost of producing another article, image, post or version of an advertising message. A company can therefore create several times more material with the same team. But if thousands of other companies do the same, the result is an overcrowded information environment in which customers have to defend their attention against a larger volume of average content. Gartner uses a term for this phenomenon that describes saturation with low-quality or low-effort AI-generated content. According to analyst Emily Weiss, consumers are not rejecting AI itself. Instead, they are changing how they judge the credibility of a source. The impact is not limited to brands’ own communications. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they rely less on influencers for purchasing information and recommendations because of the spread of AI-generated content. At the same time, 43 percent of consumers say the same trend is making them rely more on real people. This could change the economics of influencer marketing. The value of a content creator has long rested on an assumption of personal connection and authenticity. If a customer cannot tell whether a recommendation genuinely comes from personal experience or is being produced at scale by a generative system, that source of trust weakens. Gartner therefore does not recommend removing AI from marketing. Weiss says the answer is to use it judiciously. The technology can improve relevance, creativity or customer experience, but increasing production by itself is not a business objective. Brands also need clear rules for the use of AI in influencer partnerships. For marketing leadership, this implies a change in measurement. If a generative system reduces the cost of one piece of content by 90 percent, producing ten times as many pieces is not success by itself. The company must track whether memorability, trust, qualified traffic or sales improve. Cheaper production without corresponding demand merely shifts the cost from production to competition for attention. This creates a paradox of the generative economy: the cheaper content becomes to produce, the scarcer a trustworthy human perspective may become. Brands that automate everything may gain a cost advantage while losing the characteristic by which customers recognized them. KEY TERMS Content saturation: A state in which the amount of available content exceeds the audience’s attention and reduces the value of an additional message. Marginal cost: The additional cost required to produce one more unit of a product or piece of content. Brand credibility: The degree to which customers regard a company’s communications and behavior as truthful and reliable.

Cheap AI-generated content is starting to hurt marketing. More than half of consumers trust brands less because of it

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