Made by humans? Human-AI co-creation, the human-origin premium and brand authenticity in the age of generative AI

This conceptual paper asks when and why perceived human involvement in AI-assisted brand creation adds relational value, and when co-creation outperforms human-only or AI-only creation. Drawing on research on brand authenticity, human-AI collaboration, creative authorship, effort and presence, signalling and consumer-brand relationships, it develops a dual-pathway framework and seven propositions. The central argument is that consumers judge AI use by inferring who retained consequential judgement over the output, not by asking whether a machine was involved. Distinguishing augmentation from substitution therefore explains why the same level of AI involvement can produce opposite outcomes. A human pathway running through intentionality, effort and presence supports authenticity, while an AI pathway running through competence and consistency supports functional evaluation. Which pathway carries more weight depends on brand type, emotional consequence, transparency and category norms. Because generative assistance makes origin divisible, consumers must allocate credit within a single artefact, and the paper specifies the human-origin premium as a conditional and falsifiable effect of that allocation. It separates what assistance does to the work from what disclosure does to the credit, and distinguishes generic AI labels from role-specific disclosure that reveals consequential human decision rights. For managers, the framework indicates when to preserve and signal human control, when to foreground machine competence and why ceremonial involvement is a liability. The propositions call for experimental and longitudinal testing across categories, cultures and levels of AI involvement.