“Made by Humans”: Why the AI Backlash in Advertising Reveals a Deeper Cultural Anxiety
There’s a familiar beat in human history: a new technology arrives, dazzles us, terrifies us, and forces us to renegotiate what it means to be human. Creativity — that ancient impulse to declare, I am here, I exist, this experience matters — is now the latest frontier of that renegotiation.
So when brands like Polaroid, Heineken, and Cadbury begin stamping their ads with “Made by Humans,” they aren't just making a marketing decision. They’re signaling a cultural tremor. Even Apple now quietly inserts Made by Humans into the closing credits of its sci-fi series Pluribus.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s anxiety. We’re living in an era where machines can produce imagery, scripts, voices, and music so convincingly that the boundary between intention and imitation has started to blur. And humans, it turns out, are terrified of losing intention.
The psychology beneath the backlash
Studies consistently show that identical artwork is rated as more meaningful, beautiful, and valuable if people believe a human made it — even when an AI created the “human” version too.
Examples:
Columbia Business School’s research showing strong valuation bias toward human-made art: https://business.columbia.edu/news/why-human-created-art-valued-more-ai-art
A peer-reviewed study revealing the “authorship effect” on beauty and meaning judgments:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41235-023-00499-6
What’s happening here has little to do with quality. It has everything to do with meaning. People don’t just consume creativity; they interpret it through the lens of human intention. Creativity, in our collective psychology, is a form of emotional witness. AI can simulate aesthetics. But it cannot witness.
Efficiency may thrill executives, but it doesn’t nourish people
From an organizational perspective, AI is deeply seductive. Faster campaigns. Cheaper content. Hyper-personalization. Scalable marketing execution. Leaders see efficiency as progress, and in many ways, it is.
But advertising, and all human storytelling, has always rested on a fragile emotional contract: A real person is trying to say something to another real person.
AI disrupts that contract. And consumers feel it.
For example:
MIT Tech Review highlights rising distrust and emotional disconnection in AI-generated branding: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/12/1084468/ai-advertising-trust-backlash/
Wired reports on the “authenticity crisis” in industries leaning heavily on automation: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-creativity-human-expression/
These cultural data points echo a truth I see in nearly every organization I advise: People will tolerate efficiency. They will not tolerate meaninglessness.
A betrayal of creativity, especially for historically marginalized communities
There’s an overlooked layer in the AI-creativity conversation: power. AI training data disproportionately erases, distorts, or stereotypes marginalized groups, especially women of color, queer creators, and artists from the Global South.
So when a brand uses AI to replace a human creator, it’s not a neutral swap. It is a decision shaped by:
Who gets to be an author
Who is displaced
Whose style is mimicked without compensation
Whose labor becomes invisible
When the Queensland Symphony Orchestra posted its now-infamous uncanny AI-generated image, the backlash wasn’t just aesthetic. It was moral. Audiences felt that an arts institution, a steward of human expression, had undermined the very thing it existed to protect.
Intersectionality matters here. If creativity is a language of identity and memory, then replacing human creators with algorithmic composites disproportionately harms communities whose stories have historically been suppressed. AI is not just a creative tool. It's a cultural gatekeeper.
A CQ (Cultural Intelligence) reading of this moment
Here’s where my lens as a cultural-intelligence researcher kicks in. Cultural intelligence teaches us that creativity is not simply the production of content, it is the articulation of lived experience through culturally shared meaning systems. From that standpoint, the “Made by Humans” surge reflects three deeper cultural needs:
A need for intention: Humans seek evidence that someone meant something. AI obliterates intentionality unless we deliberately preserve it.
A need for relational creativity: Creativity is not an object; it’s a relationship. Without the sense of a human “other,” the relationship collapses.
A need for trustworthy authorship: When authorship becomes ambiguous, so does accountability. This is especially destabilizing for historically marginalized groups already fighting for narrative legitimacy.
This is why the “AI vs. human” debate is too shallow. The real question is cultural, not technological: Who gets to create meaning? And how do we preserve the emotional legitimacy of that meaning in an age of automation?
A quick story from my work
Earlier this year, during a leadership retreat, a nonprofit team presented a video titled “Our Path Forward.” The content was beautiful, but one employee quietly said afterward, “It felt like it was written by a machine.”
She didn’t mean it literally. She meant there was no soul in it. No lived experience. No fingerprints.
I remember thinking: This is the future of work if we’re not careful, polished deliverables without any emotional anchor.
Organizations that forget the human texture of creativity eventually lose trust.
What leaders can learn from the ‘Made by Humans’ moment
Here’s where this matters for nonprofits, social movements, schools, advocacy orgs, and values-driven companies — the world you and I both live in.
Authenticity will become a competitive advantage: People increasingly evaluate meaning by evaluating authorship. Leaders must consider how they will be transparent about what is human-made, AI-assisted, or AI-generated.
Creativity will be judged by intentionality, not polish: Polished AI outputs are everywhere. Human creative work will differentiate itself through voice, memory, identity, and cultural rootedness.
AI cannot replace emotional narrative: Harvard Business Review notes that human storytelling remains the core driver of trust and belonging in organizations: https://hbr.org/2023/10/what-ai-cant-do-for-your-culture
“Human-made” must also mean inclusive, ethical, culturally respectful: Otherwise we’re just recreating old patterns with shinier tools.
The road ahead: what this cultural moment signals
We are approaching a cultural inversion: In a world drowning in AI-generated content, human creativity will become the scarce resource.
I expect three trends:
Human intentionality becomes a brand asset (we’re already seeing this).
Culturally-grounded storytelling rises in value, because AI cannot replicate culturally lived experience.
Organizations will need Cultural Intelligence more than ever to navigate meaning, authorship, and identity in a blended human-machine world.
AI is not the enemy. Meaninglessness is. And meaning, for now, still requires a human heart.
Closing thought
“Made by Humans” isn’t a slogan. It’s a cultural lifeline; a reminder that creativity isn’t simply production. It’s presence. It’s memory. It’s identity made visible.
AI can amplify our creative reach. But only humans can embed intention, responsibility, and emotional truth.
The future won’t belong to the organizations that produce the most content. It will belong to the ones who protect the meaning behind what they make.
