{"id":349207,"date":"2025-12-16T16:00:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T16:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/349207\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T16:00:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T16:00:08","slug":"why-2026-could-be-the-year-of-anti-ai-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/349207\/","title":{"rendered":"Why 2026 could be the year of anti-AI marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

New York
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s getting harder to escape slop, the artificial intelligence-generated pablum that has crept into our colleagues\u2019 slide decks<\/a>, our social media feeds, our news outlets<\/a>, even our real-estate listings.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cSlop oozes into everything,\u201d wrote the editors of Merriam-Webster, who chose \u201cslop\u201d as their 2025 word of the year<\/a>. \u201cLike slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don\u2019t want to touch.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n That\u2019s why I\u2019m taking a moment to peer into my crystal ball and make one of those dreaded year-end predictions: 2026 will be the year of \u201c100% human\u201d marketing.\n <\/p>\n

\n Hear me out.\n <\/p>\n

\n AI \u201cslop\u201d tends to evoke innocuous images of \u201cShrimp Jesus\u201d<\/a> or big-eyed cat soap operas<\/a>. But the slop imagery is getting more sophisticated, creating a crisis of confidence<\/a> among even those of us who grew up with the internet and fancy themselves expert, or at least decent, spotters of fake stuff. The usual tells \u2014 unnatural lighting, awkwardly rendered hands, incongruous background images \u2014 have been largely smoothed over.\n <\/p>\n

\n A casual scroll on TikTok now feels like a test: Did you spot the fake or did you mindlessly double-tap on that video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline?<\/a> (You know you fell for it! We all did!)\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s a crummy feeling, being duped. And some semblance of a backlash has already begun.\n <\/p>\n

\n Last month, the radio and podcasting giant iHeartMedia rolled out a \u201cguaranteed human\u201d tagline, promising users that it won\u2019t use \u201cAI-generated personalities\u201d<\/a> or play AI-generated music.\n <\/p>\n

\n The San Antonio-based audio company\u2019s own research found 90% of its listeners \u2014 even those who use AI tools themselves \u2014 want their media created by humans.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s important for us to remember, as marketers, that we\u2019re in a very delicate position within a turbulent time, both in America and around the world,\u201d Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, said in a statement<\/a> this fall. \u201cConsumers are not just looking for convenience \u2014 they\u2019re searching for meaning.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n iHeartMedia is not alone. Earlier this month, the editors of The Tyee, an independent news site in Canada, published their decision<\/a> to adopt a no-AI policy, saying they would not publish \u201cjournalism that is written or generated by AI.\u201d (To be sure, it\u2019s a small newsroom, and few if any major news outlets have made similar commitments. But several prominent newspapers<\/a> that have rushed to embrace AI are now dealing with the fallout, most notably the Washington Post, which recently released a widely criticized error-ridden podcast bot<\/a>.)\n <\/p>\n

\n In Hollywood, where AI is often seen as an existential threat, some creators are driving the point home with audiences. \u201cThis show was made by humans,\u201d read the credits of \u201cPluribus<\/a>,\u201d the hit Apple TV series from \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d creator Vince Gilligan. Others are actively rooting against \u201cTilly Norwood,\u201d<\/a> the AI-generated \u201cactress\u201d whose creators swear Tilly is more of a digital experiment and not an effort to replace human actors.\n <\/p>\n

\n On Pinterest, the go-to site for fashion mood boards and wedding inspiration, the company\u2019s embrace of AI is alienating its most dedicated users, as my colleague Ramishah Maruf reported<\/a> last month. And across New York City, subway ads for the wearable AI recording device known as \u201cFriend\u201d have been the target of relentless vandalism<\/a>, inspiring passersby to scrawl messages like \u201cAI is not your friend\u201d and \u201ctalk to a neighbor.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n One artist was so fed up with the decline of the internet, she created Slop Evader<\/a>, a browser extension that filters web searches to include only results from before November 2022 \u2014 before the release of ChatGPT.\n <\/p>\n

\n Bottom line: I could be wrong! So far, the AI pushback is tiny compared with the swath of Corporate America that\u2019s convinced it\u2019s the future of the entire economy. Ultimately, we\u2019ll have to see if experiments in anti-AI marketing yield any real returns.\n <\/p>\n

\n Still, I suspect that the more Wall Street and the C-suite opine about the brilliance of AI and its boundless potential to increase productivity and even creativity, the more many people are going to see it as a trap.\n <\/p>\n

\n So far, our lived experience with chatbots and image generators is a mixed bag. Sure, it can be fun to tell Sora<\/a> to make a video of my dog flying with Santa Claus over the Parisian skyline. And yeah, sometimes a chatbot is better than a typical web search when you need travel recommendations. But it is also a deepfake generator that can rapidly amplify misinformation (as xAI\u2019s Grok did during the Bondi Beach shooting<\/a> Sunday) and lure people into delusional<\/a>, sometimes deadly<\/a> spirals.\n <\/p>\n

\n Consumers and creatives might just be starting to cry uncle. Or at least, prefer some things still made by human hands.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-349207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}