A clearly machine-made advert comes on the television, and the room sighs. Muriithi, who works in corporate communication at Minet Kenya, says he has sat among viewers when it happened. In an opinion piece for The Standard he reads the sigh as a verdict: it looks fake.
He calls the mood “AI fatigue.” His argument is opinion, not a study, but data from advertising research on the other side of the world points the same way.
What the fatigue looks like
Muriithi argues that people read authenticity almost by instinct, and that human work has a grain machines will struggle to reproduce: the awkward pause mid-conversation, the imperfect facial expression you remember afterward. It explains why crowds still turn up for live performance even though studio recordings sound cleaner, and why a mural painted by hand or a speech someone wrote personally still lands. Visible effort, he says, signals sincerity.
The AI material flooding the media is not necessarily poor, in his view. Some of it shines. What bothers him is the emptiness. It seems complete before it has said anything, with faces too symmetrical and voices too smooth, and it reads as manufactured stimulation built to catch the eye for a moment before the scroll carries it off.
Online, he sees exhaustion too. People call out synthetic pictures and clips, half amused and half irritated, and the wonder of the first months is turning into doubt.
Brands feel it first
Advertisers hold the numbers. A Yahoo Finance piece by Kim LaCapria, dated August 20, 2026, pointed to Pew Research Center data: half of Americans say they feel more concern than excitement about AI, and 53% expect it to weaken people’s capacity for independent creative thought.
The doubt has reached the shop floor. Valentino ran a handbag campaign made entirely with AI in late 2025. The BBC noted that Instagram users branded it “cheap” and “lazy.” Work published in the Journal of Advertising Research showed that people judge luxury labels more harshly once AI imagery is disclosed, since the work looks like less effort and the brand looks less genuine. A 2026 study from DoubleVerify on media quality put a number on the risk: 43% of North American consumers said low-quality or “uncanny” AI ads would lower their view of a brand. Coca-Cola took similar heat in late 2024 for holiday ads generated entirely by AI that recalled a 1995 campaign.
Muriithi understands the pull. AI is quicker and cheaper, so why pay photographers, writers, designers and voice actors for every campaign? His reply is that automation raises the value of what is plainly human. Trust, he says, rests on originality and a measure of vulnerability, and algorithms cannot turn out either in bulk.
Not a ban on the tool
Neither source argues for dropping the technology. Used with care, Muriithi says, it helps with research and repetitive chores, can sift large datasets in journalism, speed up experiments in design and tailor marketing messages. Yahoo Finance landed in a similar place: brands may do better if AI backs up human creators and does not replace them.
After the Coca-Cola ads, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch put the cost to artists in a joke. “FUN FACT: @CocaCola is ‘red’ because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists,” he wrote.
Sources
- Communicators should take note of growing AI fatigue (The Standard, Kenya; opinion)
- After Coca-Cola's AI commercial backlash, human-made ads may carry more appeal than AI-generated content (Yahoo Finance)
