A new survey found that 73% of people aged 18 to 29 consider it unacceptable for brands to use AI to simulate people or human voices in ads. Platforms including LinkedIn, YouTube and Etsy are responding to growing concerns about AI-generated content.
AI-generated content was supposed to make the internet faster, cheaper and more productive.
Instead, for many users, it is making the internet harder to trust.
AI-generated images, videos, articles and social media posts are increasingly filling digital feeds. Search engines are surfacing pages created primarily to capture traffic, while businesses are experimenting with AI-generated advertising and product listings.
Now, the backlash is becoming measurable.
A new survey from Gallup and Bentley University found that 66% of people aged 18 to 29 have negative opinions of AI-generated advertising. Even more strikingly, 73% of respondents in that age group said it is unacceptable for brands to use AI to simulate people or human voices in advertisements.
For businesses targeting younger consumers, that is difficult to ignore.
Gen Z is not rejecting AI. It is rejecting artificiality
The distinction matters.
Young consumers are not necessarily opposed to artificial intelligence itself. They are increasingly sceptical when companies use AI to manufacture something that is supposed to feel human.
An AI-generated product description is one thing. An advertisement pretending to feature a real person or voice can feel very different.
That may explain why some of the strongest resistance is appearing in areas built around authenticity, creativity and personal expression.
The problem is not simply that content is AI-generated. It is that consumers often cannot tell what is real, who created it and whether anyone cared enough to make it properly.
Etsy shows what happens when AI floods a marketplace
Etsy has become one of the clearest examples.
The platform was built around handmade, personalised and distinctive products. But sellers have increasingly complained about mass-produced merchandise, resellers and AI-generated products competing with genuinely handmade work.
Etsy allows sellers to disclose AI use under its creativity standards, but the growing presence of AI-generated products has frustrated some merchants.
Some sellers say their traffic and sales have suffered as the marketplace becomes harder to distinguish.
One Etsy seller on Reddit described traffic falling dramatically while competing against AI-generated and dropshipped products.
Another seller said someone had taken photographs from their original listing, run their artwork through AI and used the altered images in another listing.
Yet Etsy’s overall business tells a more complicated story.
The company’s marketplace revenue reached $668 million in its most recent quarter, while marketplace growth increased 9.3% year over year.
So the platform itself may benefit financially even as individual sellers feel increasingly squeezed.
Buyers still aren’t necessarily buying AI
The gap between supply and demand becomes even more obvious on CGTrader, a marketplace for 3D assets used by game developers, filmmakers and 3D printing enthusiasts.
AI-generated assets have flooded the platform, but according to CGTrader, they account for only about $1 of every $90 in revenue.
Its conclusion is revealing:
“AI floods the top of the funnel but not the bottom.”
In other words, creating AI content is becoming extremely easy. Getting people to actually value and pay for it is another matter.
The marketplace also reported that 20% of customers who tried AI-generated assets found them insufficient for their needs.
That points to a broader problem for businesses chasing AI efficiency. More content does not automatically mean more value.
Platforms are beginning to fight the AI slop problem
The backlash is also changing the behaviour of major platforms.
LinkedIn recently introduced a reporting option allowing users to flag posts that appear to be AI-generated “slop.”
LinkedIn chief product officer Hari Srinivasan said users come to the platform to connect with real people and share their perspectives, ideas and expertise.
YouTube has also adjusted its systems to reduce the visibility of certain AI-generated videos.
Spotify has taken a different approach, removing millions of bulk uploads, duplicate songs and other spammy tracks.
The underlying principle is becoming increasingly clear.
Platforms may be happy to use AI behind the scenes. They are less interested in allowing unlimited low-value AI content to overwhelm the experience users actually came for.
The economics of AI slop are still complicated
There is an obvious contradiction.
AI-generated content is often cheap to produce, easy to scale and capable of generating enormous volumes of material.
That makes it attractive to businesses, creators and people looking for quick traffic.
But the same abundance can destroy the scarcity that made digital content valuable in the first place.
If everyone can generate 10,000 images, 5,000 articles or hundreds of videos overnight, production stops being the competitive advantage.
Taste becomes the advantage.
So does originality, expertise, credibility and the ability to make something that feels unmistakably human.
The real warning for brands
The 73% figure should not be interpreted as “Gen Z hates AI.”
That would miss the more important signal.
Gen Z appears increasingly uncomfortable with AI pretending to be human, particularly in advertising.
That distinction matters for marketers.
Consumers may happily use an AI assistant, recommendation engine or editing tool. But when a brand replaces a real voice, creator or human story with synthetic content without making that clear, it risks turning efficiency into distrust.
The internet has spent years rewarding brands for producing more content.
AI has made that content almost infinitely scalable.
The next competitive advantage may be learning when not to produce more.
Because when everyone can manufacture content, the rarest thing online may become something much simpler.
Something worth believing.
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Illustration: Inc; Photo: Adobe Stock
Source: Inc.
