According to Business Insider, a November survey of over 6,000 US consumers found that overall sentiment toward AI-generated advertising skewed negative at 39%, with only 18% feeling positive. Major brands faced significant backlash for their AI ad experiments this year, including McDonald’s Netherlands, which pulled a holiday ad in December 2025 after social media users called its characters “creepy.” Coca-Cola released three AI holiday ads, with one facing criticism for inconsistent details like shifting truck wheels, despite scoring a high 5.9-star rating from testing firm System1. In a separate incident, apparel brand True Classic discovered Meta’s ad platform had automatically swapped its top-performing ad creative for an AI-generated image of a “cheerful granny.” Furthermore, fashion retailer H&M announced plans in March to create “digital twins” of 30 models, drawing sharp criticism from industry advocates.
The Uncanny Valley of Advertising
Here’s the thing about using AI to invent stories from scratch, as that adtech exec said: you don’t get innovation, you get an approximation. And audiences can smell an approximation a mile away. The McDonald’s and Coca-Cola holiday ads are perfect examples. They weren’t just “bad” in a traditional sense; they felt off. They landed in that uncanny valley where the logic is slightly broken (shape-shifting truck wheels) and the emotion feels synthetic. It’s one thing for a human-made ad to be cheesy or sentimental, but it’s another for an AI-made ad to feel hollow. That hollowness is what triggers the “creepy” response. Brands are so eager to be seen as innovative that they’re skipping the crucial step of asking: does this actually connect with people, or are we just making a tech demo?
The Automation Slippery Slope
But the True Classic story with Meta is arguably scarier for advertisers. This wasn’t a brand consciously choosing to use a weird AI granny. This was the platform deciding for them. Advertisers reported that toggles for Meta’s full image generation feature were automatically switched back on, even after being turned off. That means real ad budgets were spent on AI-generated content without explicit consent. That’s a huge deal. It points to a future where the platforms, in their quest to optimize and automate everything, could fundamentally alter a brand’s message and aesthetic. You can spend months crafting a brand identity, only for an algorithm to decide it would perform better with a randomly generated grandma. Where does the brand’s control end and the platform’s automation begin?
Replacing Humans: The Ethical Quandary
The fashion industry controversies cut even deeper. When H&M talks about “digital twins” and Guess uses AI models like “Vivienne” and “Anastasia,” they’re not just playing in the uncanny valley. They’re directly threatening livelihoods. The criticism from the Model Alliance’s Sara Ziff hits hard: this isn’t just about models, but a whole ecosystem of makeup artists, stylists, and photographers. The cofounders of the AI agency behind the Guess ads say they want to “co-exist,” but let’s be real. If a brand can pay once for a digital model that never ages, needs no lunch breaks, and can wear anything without a fitting, why would they consistently hire humans? The 30% drop in brand partnerships with AI social accounts in 2025, per Collabstr data, might be the first sign of audience rejection. Maybe AI models are the latest fast-fashion casualty—a trend that flamed out because it felt soulless.
So What’s the Future Here?
Look, AI in advertising isn’t going away. The genie is out of the bottle. The question is how brands use it. The smart path seems to be using it as a tool within the human creative process, not as a replacement for it. Use it for brainstorming mood boards, generating background elements, or rapid prototyping. But the moment you ask it to be the heart and soul of a campaign, you risk the kind of headline-grabbing backlash we saw all year. Coca-Cola’s agency co-founder defended the holiday ads by saying they stopped debating if AI is perfect and focused on using it creatively. But is an ad with glitching wheels “creative,” or just sloppy? The backlash itself is becoming a trend—”brands hating on AI.” Maybe the real innovation in 2026 will be brands loudly championing human creativity as their premium differentiator. Now that would be a twist.
