Human Presence in Short-Form Video Advertising: Social Judgments of Human and AI Presenters Under Privacy Concerns

Digital retailing increasingly relies on short-form video advertising where human and AI presenters coexist, requiring consumers to form rapid social judgments based on minimal perceptual cues. This research examines how presentation format shapes consumer responses through perceived creator responsibility and effort, and how viewer-inferred privacy concern moderates these effects. Drawing on social cognition, deindividuation, and heuristic-cue perspectives, two online experiments (N = 656; N = 769) compared a human presenter with captions-only and with an AI avatar in retail-product video scenarios. Across both studies, the presence of a human presenter enhanced attitudes toward the video, perceived usefulness, trust, and purchase intention by sequentially increasing perceived responsibility and effort, reflecting viewers’ attributions of agency and motivational investment. Viewer-inferred privacy concern weakened these effects by attenuating responsibility attributions, demonstrating how contextual explanations recalibrate social judgments. The findings show that minimal human cues function as social cognitive signals of accountability in digital retail advertising. This research advances understanding of human judgment and decision making in consumer contexts and offers guidance for balancing human and AI communication under privacy-sensitive conditions.