Consumer Responses to AI-Generated Charitable Giving Ads

Content created by employing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, also known as synthetic content, promises to radically change the advertising and marketing landscape in the coming decades, presumably for the better. It is fundamental for advertising and marketing scholars and practitioners to have solid knowledge of how synthetic content is perceived by consumers before widespread adoption is promoted. Across three experimental studies we tested how consumers in charitable giving contexts reacted to advertising messages featuring content generated by an AI neural network. We show that potential donors responded differently to children’s faces when they knew they had been generated by AI. Study 1…