The Authenticity Premium
Merriam-Webster chose "slop" as their 2025 word of the year. Which is funny, because I've definitely used Claude to draft emails I didn't have the energy to write myself. Glass houses, etc.
There's a difference between using AI as a tool and letting it become the voice.
The Collapse of Preference
Two years ago, 60% of consumers said they preferred AI-generated creator content. Today, according to Billion Dollar Boy, that number has collapsed to 26%.
Think about that trajectory. We went from enthusiasm to exhaustion in twenty-four months. The novelty wore off. The sameness became suffocating. And people started to notice — really notice — what was missing.
McDonald’s learned this when their AI-generated Christmas ad sparked fury, not festivity. Comments like “ruined my Christmas spirit” flooded social media. The production company defended itself by noting that “ten people worked full-time for five weeks” on the piece. A critic responded: “What about the humans who would have been in it?”
That question landed differently than they expected. Because what consumers heard wasn’t a defense. They heard an admission.
The Paradox of Efficiency
Here’s what makes this moment strange. AI content isn’t bad because it’s low-quality. It’s bad because it’s perfectly average.
As one creative director told Marketing Dive: “A lot of the output is trending toward the median. It’s about pulling against the median because all of the content is merging to look very, very similar.”
The efficiency gains are real. You can produce ten times the content at a fraction of the cost. But when everyone has access to the same tools, everyone produces the same output. Differentiation evaporates.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri acknowledged this in a recent post: “Authenticity is fast becoming a scarce resource.” The bar is shifting, he wrote, from “can you create?” to “can you make something that only you could create?”
This connects to something I wrote about last week. In “The Only Moat Left,” I argued that trust has become the only durable competitive advantage — not product, not distribution, not data. AI slop is one of the mechanisms by which trust gets eroded. Every generic, obviously-automated touchpoint is a small withdrawal from the trust account. Enough withdrawals, and you’re overdrawn.
Two Audiences, Two Problems
Here’s where the picture gets complicated.
I’ve written about agentic commerce — the rise of AI agents that shop on behalf of consumers. In that world, brand meaning gets compressed into data points: specifications, reviews, return rates. The agent doesn’t care about your brand story. It cares about signals that can be quantified and compared.
But not every interaction is agent-mediated. Not yet. And the interactions that remain human — the moments when an actual person encounters your content, your marketing, your communication — those moments are becoming higher-stakes precisely because they’re rarer.
Think about it this way: if a third of your future customers will delegate purchasing to AI agents, those agents will evaluate you on operational trustworthiness. But the other two-thirds? The ones still making their own decisions? They’re drowning in AI slop. They’re developing finely-tuned BS detectors. They’re craving something that feels real.
The brands that win will need to do both: be operationally trustworthy enough to satisfy the algorithms and be authentically human enough to connect with the people who haven’t outsourced their decisions yet.
The Employee Advantage
This is where employee advocacy becomes strategic, not just tactical.
I wrote recently about why authentic employee voices matter — how content shared by employees receives eight times the engagement of corporate channels, how leads from employee advocacy convert at seven times the rate. The Edelman data showing employees are more trusted than CEOs.
In an AI-slop environment, that advantage compounds. An employee sharing what they’re genuinely working on doesn’t look like AI content. It can’t look like AI content, because it’s specific, situated, human in its imperfections. The engineer explaining a technical challenge. The designer sharing a decision that took three iterations. The customer success manager celebrating a real win.
These aren’t content strategies. They’re proof of life.
The brands that have been investing in genuine employee voices — not the cargo-cult version with pre-written LinkedIn posts, but the real version where people are supported in building their own professional presence — those brands have a structural advantage in the authenticity economy. They have humans willing to be publicly human.
What This Means in Practice
I’m not arguing that AI has no place in marketing. That would be naive. The tools are too powerful, the efficiency gains too real.
But I am arguing that the question has shifted. It’s no longer “can AI do this?” It’s “does AI-created content undermine the very thing this moment is supposed to accomplish?”
Product descriptions? Sure. Holiday campaigns meant to stir genuine emotion? Probably not.
Data analysis? Absolutely. Thought leadership meant to demonstrate hard-won expertise? Dangerous territory.
Backend operations? Go for it. Customer-facing moments that depend on trust? Proceed with extreme caution.
The irony is thick. The more sophisticated AI becomes at mimicking us, the more valuable authentic human imperfection becomes. The better machines get at producing content, the more we crave what they can’t replicate.
The Moat Extends
Trust is still the moat. That hasn’t changed. But authenticity is how trust gets signaled in a world where everything can be faked.
Your imperfect founder video. Your employees’ unpolished perspectives. Your willingness to say something that couldn’t have been written by a committee or generated by a model. These aren’t liabilities to be managed. They’re assets that appreciate as the median keeps rising.
For years, we talked about differentiation through brand, through product, through price. Now add another layer: differentiation through humanity.
Not as a marketing claim. As an operational reality. The accumulated evidence of real people doing real work, made visible.
The premium is real. And it’s just getting started.
*This article was originally published on rebeccaraebarton.com