Valentino, Coca-Cola backlash: human-made becomes luxury as AI ads flop

The backlash against Valentino and Coca-Cola's AI-generated ads reflects a deeper consumer anxiety about artificial intelligence in creative work. While AI adoption is spreading across industries, public sentiment remains skeptical—half of Americans express more concern than enthusiasm about AI's growing role, and over half worry it will erode human creative thinking. The Journal of Advertising Research's scholarship reveals the specific mechanism behind the pushback: when luxury brands explicitly use and disclose AI imagery, consumers interpret the work as low-effort, which directly undermines the brand's perceived craftsmanship and authenticity. This perception gap matters because it inverts the usual luxury positioning. Historically, luxury signaled rarity, craftsmanship, and human touch; AI-generated content signals scale and automation—the opposite. DoubleVerify's 2026 research reinforces this: nearly half of North American consumers (43%) would actively downgrade their opinion of a brand using low-quality or "uncanny" AI ads, suggesting that as AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous, the rare artifact—one made by human hands—could flip into a premium category.