The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly reshaped contemporary marketing practice, particularly in the domain of digital and social media communication. AI-enabled systems are now capable of autonomously generating marketing content, including captions, visuals, and personalized messages, allowing firms to scale communication efforts while enhancing relevance and efficiency (Davenport, Guha, Grewal, & Bressgott, 2020). As social media platforms continue to function as primary interfaces between brands and consumers, AI-generated content has become an increasingly central element of digital marketing strategies. Prior research on AI in marketing has predominantly focused on analytics, automation, and service efficiency, emphasizing firm-level performance outcomes such as productivity, targeting accuracy, and cost reduction (Huang & Rust, 2021). While these studies provide valuable insights into the operational benefits of AI, they offer limited understanding of consumer-level responses to AI-generated brand communication. In particular, there is a growing need to examine how consumers perceive and react to AI-generated content in interactive environments such as social media, where relational and symbolic brand meanings are continuously constructed. One brand-related outcome that warrants closer attention in this context is brand authenticity. Brand authenticity reflects consumers’ perceptions of a brand as genuine, sincere, and true to its values, and it has been shown to play a critical role in shaping trust, emotional attachment, and long-term brand equity (Beverland, Wilner, & Micheli, 2019). However, the increasing use of algorithmically generated content introduces new tensions for authenticity perceptions. While AI-generated content may be informative, creative, and personalized, consumers may also perceive such communication as impersonal or artificially constructed, potentially undermining authenticity in brand–consumer relationships.
Sayyad et al. (Fri,) studied this question.