Brands sell humanity as AI distrust grows, and even AI companies are joining in

Humanity is becoming a positioning. Marketing Brew’s September 1 survey of recent work found Etsy, TD Bank, Polaroid, Pinterest and Heineken all fronting campaigns about human connection and time spent offline, while two AI companies tried to defuse the mood directly: Anthropic’s 90-second “Hope in Hard Questions” spot for Claude confronts distrust of the technology, and Meta’s “The Future is For Everyone” pitches techno-optimism. Liquid Death and Garage Beer went the other way with a 90-second musical about cooling data centers with urine.

The trend has numbers behind it. Digiday this week cited a WordPress VIP survey in which 60% of US consumers called AI in brand messaging a turnoff. Gartner data cited by Marketing przy Kawie puts the share of consumers who would rather brands avoid generative AI in customer-facing content at 50%, with 68% of internet users doubting the authenticity of what they see online. Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer finds roughly half of lower- and middle-income respondents see AI as more threat than benefit.

Megha Parikh of VML told Marketing Brew that people feel they are not in control and that humanity is “a very powerful message to empower people.” Marcus Collins of the University of Michigan framed it as a societal existential moment, and Liquid Death’s Andy Pearson joked that brands having to prove they are human amounts to a real-life captcha.

Why it matters

The craft signals are consistent: film stock, handmade elements, behind-the-scenes footage and visibly imperfect production, all meant to show a person was there. Digiday reports brands shifting spend toward older millennial and Gen X creators precisely because their mortgages, parenting and health stories read as unfakeable, and agencies say those deals are becoming long-term rather than one-off.

The Polish market is running the same play. Marketing przy Kawie points to Tygodnik Powszechny’s five-message out-of-home campaign, led creatively by Ewelina Lebida, which asks whether a chatbot hugged the reader today and promises community with people rather than algorithms, and to The Economist’s 2026 digital out-of-home lines “Pre-empt the prompt” and “Authentic intelligence.”

What’s next

The tension is that most of these advertisers use AI heavily behind the scenes, and disclosure rules now force the question into the open: Instagram said on August 31 it will limit the reach of unlabeled AI personas, and the EU AI Act’s labelling duties have applied since August 2. Human-first messaging works as long as it is not contradicted by an AI-generated hero image. The brands that come through are likely to be those that decide where AI stays invisible, where it is disclosed, and where a person has to be on camera.