I’m seeing a certain storyline making the rounds on LinkedIn and in agency blogs. It usually goes something like this: AI content is ruining brands. Audiences can spot it a mile away. Everything looks fake. Trust is evaporating. Only humans can save us.
It’s a dramatic narrative. But it’s deja vu. It sounds just like the early days of the web, when people (typically traditional ad agencies) insisted that websites would cheapen brands and destroy real customer relationships. I remember those conversations well. Back then, a local carpet store was running TV ads (likely produced by one of those ad agencies) bragging about their three locations and proudly declaring that they had no website. The father and son who owned it were convinced that no website could ever communicate who they were. If people wanted to know them, they needed to physically walk in. That fear of technology replacing authenticity was everywhere in 1996, but they, like the other critics, now have robust websites that re-enforce their brands in ways they claimed would never be possible back the.
The pattern is familiar. Every time a new tool appears, someone insists it will erase what makes brands human. But of course, none of that happened. The web didn’t kill trust. It modernized communication and made brands more accessible. The same thing is happening with AI right now, and the fear is coming from the same place. After 40 years in marketing and media, and nearly 30 years running Trivera, I’ve seen every one of these cycles play out. The technology evolves. The same old fears re-surface every time.
The Real Problem Isn’t AI
A lot of the anti AI conversation points to a real issue, but not the one being advertised. There absolutely is AI that looks plastic, seems generic, or feels off. But that’s not because AI is inherently soulless. It’s because lazy inputs create lazy outputs.
And that problem is nothing new. We’ve been dealing with slop long before AI existed. Anyone who has worked in marketing for more than five minutes remembers the eras of overused stock photography, clip art, templated blog spam, and offshore content mills. None of that required artificial intelligence to lower the bar.
The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the lack of craft.
What Audiences Actually Notice
If you read the commentary from the anti AI crowd, you’ll see claims that audiences are losing trust the moment they sense AI anything. It’s a solid emotional pitch, but it falls apart as soon as you look for evidence.
HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing report found that 72 percent of marketers using AI saw either improved or unchanged engagement compared to human only content. Gartner’s research shows that audience trust does not decrease when AI content is properly reviewed, edited, and aligned to brand tone. And a joint MIT and Stanford study found that people cannot reliably distinguish human content from AI content when quality is controlled.
So the issue isn’t AI itself. It’s the sameness and sloppiness that happen when effort disappears. In other words, people aren’t rejecting AI. They’re rejecting content that feels generic, repetitive, or disconnected.
At Trivera, we see this every day. When a piece of content is thoughtful, has a clear point of view, and reflects the brand’s real personality, it performs. When it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The tool used to produce it is not the deciding factor.
The Trivera Approach Doesn’t Fit the Slop Narrative
Which brings me to a question I’ve heard a few times: do our blogs or our Chip and Nova episodes fall into the AI slop category? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that our whole process is designed to avoid the very pitfalls critics are describing.
Every piece of content we create begins with a human idea, a perspective, and a purpose. The AI supports the process the way Photoshop supports a designer or a mixing board supports a producer. It speeds up what shouldn’t be slow and amplifies what should be strong.
Chip and Nova are a good example of that balance. Yes, the episodes are created with a lot of assistance from AI. That’s intentional. It allows us to build a consistent world, personalities, and dialogue quickly enough to make the series sustainable. But the raw AI output is only the rough clay. Every episode goes through extensive editing, rewriting, restructuring, and fine tuning before it ever reaches the public. The story, the tone, the humor, the insights, and the pacing are all shaped through deliberate human craftsmanship.
And if you want validation from outside our walls, we have it. A former Trivera employee who is now a high profile national TV producer listened to our earliest Deep Dive episodes. His first question was whether Chip and Nova were employees or hired voice talent. He was completely convinced they were human. A year later, knowing they are AI based, he still listens and continues to applaud the quality of every episode.
The numbers show he’s not alone. The Deep Dive has already surpassed the thresholds most podcasts never reach, placing it well above typical performance for a niche business show. Engagement continues to grow, episodes are being heard across multiple platforms, and the audience behaves more like a loyal following than casual passersby.
If anything, Chip and Nova are proof that AI can scale authenticity instead of diluting it.
Audiences Want Realness, Not Purity Tests
The claim that using AI automatically destroys trust comes from a misunderstanding of what audiences actually value. People don’t form emotional connections with a tool. They connect with meaning, usefulness, honesty, and consistency.
Nielsen Norman Group’s 2024 trust study found that consumers judge content based on clarity, transparency, and perceived effort. Not whether the copy was typed by a human hand. McKinsey’s research echoes the same finding: content is trusted when it helps, informs, or resonates.
This aligns with what we see across client work. When content feels crafted, intentional, and aligned with a brand’s voice, people respond. When it feels like a copy-and-paste job, people tune out. AI or not.
AI Is a Multiplier, Not a Replacement
So why the fear? Because we’ve seen this pattern before. Every creative industry eventually hits a moment where a new tool appears and people worry it will erase the human touch. But creativity doesn’t vanish when a tool evolves. It adapts and expands.
Writers once worried that word processors would ruin the craft. Photographers said the same about digital cameras. And in radio…where I spent 15 years before Trivera…the panic was about music scheduling software. DJs complained that song selection generated by computers would remove their creativity from the airwaves. In reality, it allowed program directors and music directors to apply expertise and data to create consistent, brand aligned programming 24 hours a day. The stations that embraced it thrived with stronger ratings and more loyal audiences, and the DJs benefited too. Instead of guessing what to play next, they had a curated structure that supported the format, kept listeners engaged, and helped keep their stations from changing formats or going off the air entirely.
Today, AI plays that same role. It gives teams the ability to ideate faster, explore more directions, personalize content at scale, and elevate good ideas into great ones. It doesn’t replace the spark. It accelerates what happens once you have it.
The Future Belongs to the Hybrid Model
The smartest brands aren’t avoiding AI and they aren’t overusing it. They’re blending it. Human insight plus AI efficiency. Human storytelling plus AI structure. Human voice plus AI scale.
The brands that win in the next decade will be the ones that combine creativity with capability, not the ones that plant their flag in all human or all machine. That’s where Trivera sits, and that’s why our content doesn’t fall into any slop bucket.
Authenticity isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about using every tool available to express something true. When you keep that at the center, the fear fades, the work gets stronger, and audiences feel the difference. Trivera clients see that balance in every engagement, because the goal is never to replace the human touch, but to amplify it. And when that happens, the results follow with the success that comes from stronger engagement, clearer messaging, and marketing that actually moves people.
