Why AI imagery is costing brands trust (and what to do instead)

Why AI imagery is costing brands their most valuable asset

The world feels… a little bit unreal right now. From the way we consume content to the way we create it, there’s a weird tension sitting at the heart of everything designed to make us feel like we should be embracing AI for all creative work, even thought it makes us feel, well, off. One way AI is being pushed is by framing it as the ‘more affordable option’.

AI image generation is (currently, not for long) cheap, fast, and increasingly convincing. Professional photography is seen as expensive, time-consuming, and requiring actual logistics. For a brand trying to show up consistently on a tight budget, the maths seem to point in one direction.

But there’s another set of numbers worth looking at. And they tell a different story.

The loss of trust is real and measurable

Getty Images spent two years surveying more than 30,000 adults across 25 countries for their VisualGPS report, Building Trust with AI and the findings are worth looking more closely at.

AI-generated imagery ranked as the least preferred image type, below real photography, retouched photography, and even 3D/CGI. And 61% of those surveyed expressed distrust towards advertising generally, with the primary driver being concern about AI-generated or manipulated imagery.

Their senior director of creative for EMEA put it bluntly by saying that people want to trust that what they are being sold is what they will get. AI-generated visuals, by virtue of being synthetic, are not taken as a true representation of a product or service, so there’s an immediate disconnect.

Nearly 90% of consumers globally said they want to know whether an image has been created using AI. Not out of curiosity, but out of a need to calibrate their trust before they decide whether to engage. You only have to think of how suspicious you are of cute animal videos right now. Do you really want people to feel the same about your actual products or business?

Disclosure doesn’t fix the problem, it just names it

You might think the answer is simply to label AI-generated content transparently, but even with this, research suggests otherwise.

The Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions studied consumer responses to AI-disclosed advertising and found that just labelling content as AI-generated made people perceive it as less natural and less useful, lowering both their attitude towards the ad and their willingness to research or purchase.

Their conclusion was clear: transparency alone ‘reveals a fundamental problem but doesn’t solve it’. Making audiences aware that an ad was made by an algorithm alerts them to question authenticity without giving them a reason to answer it positively. Even polished AI content falls short when the audience’s gut feeling doesn’t trust it.

And gut feelings, it turns out, are operating whether consumers are consciously aware of it or not. NielsenIQ’s research into hidden consumer attitudes found that people are sensitive to the authenticity of ad creatives at both unconscious and conscious levels.

The difference between what brands think and what audiences feel

Maybe the most telling data comes from IAB’s 2026 AI Ad Gap report. In 2024, 30% of consumers said a brand using AI seemed innovative. By 2026, that figure had dropped to 23%. Meanwhile, the percentage of advertisers who believed AI signalled innovation had risen from 40% to 49%.

Brands are doubling down on a signal that is fast losing its value with the very audiences they’re trying to reach. The crevice between what the industry believes and what consumers experience is widening measurably.

The ‘human-made’ movement is already underway

It’s not just a research trend. It’s a market movement. Academic researchers and industry analysts have begun documenting what they’re calling a backlash against AI imagery in advertising, with brands increasingly choosing to lead with ‘human-made’ as a deliberate differentiator.

Studies show that people value creative works more when they know a human made them. Not because human work is automatically better, but because human-made carries a signal that AI-generated cannot: someone cared enough to make this specifically.

For product brands, especially smaller, independent ones whose entire value proposition rests on personality, specificity, and connection, that message is everything.

The real content problem isn’t budget but structure

The brands turning to AI for their imagery aren’t doing it because they don’t care about quality. They’re doing it because the alternative, commissioning real photography, has felt like a feast-or-famine proposition. A campaign shoot produces a beautiful, finite set of images that has to last until the next budget cycle. For a brand that needs to show up consistently month after month in a world of the forever hungry algorithm, that model can break down fast.

The fix isn’t AI. The fix is restructuring how real photography is made and priced. This is precisely what HIYA STUDIO PASS was built to solve.

A monthly rhythm of real photography without the campaign budget

STUDIO PASS is my fixed monthly photography retainer: three art-directed themes, ten images each, thirty beautifully styled still life photographs delivered every month.

Everything a campaign shoot includes from the creative direction, the prop sourcing, the colour strategy, the styling to the set builds, usually done for one campaign image at a time, batched efficiently so that the overhead is spread across thirty images instead of three. That’s what makes it accessible. Not a compromise on quality. A smarter structure.

The HIYA MARIANNE studio is full of real things: real backdrops, real props, real colour decisions made by a real human who knows your brand. No prompts. No uncanny valley. No images that make your audience feel vaguely uneasy without knowing why. Just photography that looks like your brand, shows up every month, and gives your audience a reason to trust you: consistently, visibly, and without the scramble.

If you’re a product brand that’s been weighing up consistency against quality this is where you stop choosing between them.

Find out more about HIYA STUDIO PASS monthly product photography retainer.

Marianne

Why AI imagery is costing brands their most valuable asset