Authenticity and AI: A communicator’s reality check

I’ve spent much of my career in experiential and integrated marketing, or communications as it’s more often labelled in Europe. Which means I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms, on sites, backstage and on half-built floors, watching ideas become real in front of other people. And over the last year or two, something has been quietly shifting.

It doesn’t feel as though the next big change in marketing will come from a new platform, format or algorithm. Those are arriving faster than we can properly digest them. The shift feels older than that. More human. It’s about touch, proximity and proof. It’s about authenticity.

Digital is now everywhere. So much so that it’s begun to feel oddly weightless. Anyone with a little curiosity and a working knowledge of DALL·E, Canva or similar tools can generate a logo, an ad or a campaign line in minutes. Work that once took a small team, a week of back and forth and a few tense approvals now appears almost instantly. Much of it looks perfectly plausible. Much of it is technically fine. And that’s precisely the problem.

When content becomes infinite, belief becomes scarce

The ubiquity of GenAI has made content effectively infinite, and therefore disposable. When everything can be made, nothing feels especially made. We scroll through an endless stream of competent, polished outputs that pass the eye test but rarely pass the gut test. They look real enough, but they don’t feel earned.

I touched on this tension before in The GenAI-enabled, augmented creative studio, where I argued that AI works best as an accelerant for human judgement, not a replacement for it. What’s becoming clearer now is the downstream effect. As synthetic output increases, audiences are becoming more sensitive to sameness. Plausibility is no longer impressive. Believability is. In that environment, authenticity becomes the scarcest resource a communicator has.

I’ve noticed that when people talk about the work that genuinely moved them, changed their mind or stuck with them, it’s increasingly something they experienced rather than something they were shown. Something they stood inside, not something that slid past them between meetings. In a world where stories can be fabricated by prompt, people are craving moments they can verify with their own bodies.

Experience as the new certificate of authenticity

A shared, physical experience has quietly become a new kind of certificate of authenticity. When something happens in the real world, in front of witnesses, it anchors everything that follows. The photos, clips and posts all carry a different weight because they’re rooted in something lived. Digital storytelling stops feeling like promotion and starts feeling like reportage. Not because it’s cleverer, but because it’s grounded.

This is why I believe the creative advantage is beginning to tilt back toward experience as proof. Not experience as spectacle or sideshow, but experience as starting point. The brands that cut through next will be the ones that begin with something tangible and then let digital extend it, rather than designing everything for the feed and hoping reality catches up later.

It echoes a theme I explored in a piece about inter-railing where the absence of constant documentation made experiences feel fuller and more trustworthy. The irony is that as documentation tools get better, the hunger for something unmediated grows stronger.

What this means for communicators now

In practice, this doesn’t require grand reinvention. It asks for a few quiet but meaningful shifts.

• Start with the tangible. Create something people can touch, taste, walk through or take part in. When they choose to record it, what they share feels earned rather than staged.
• Design for the proof moment. That instant where participation replaces persuasion, where belief arrives not because you said the right thing, but because someone was there.
• Flip the workflow. Treat the live moment as the pilot and digital as the echo. The proof comes first, the post second.
• Measure what actually matters. Not how many impressions were bought, but how many people cared enough to share without being asked or paid.
• And guard against GenAI sameness. As creative output becomes increasingly synthetic, originality is likely to migrate away from the screen and back into the physical world. A brand’s most human work may soon be the moments it stages, not the assets it renders.

Experiential work is no longer a nice-to-have or a glossy extra. It’s becoming the credibility engine for everything else. When the internet fills with flawless simulations, what cuts through is imperfection. Something unscripted. Something witnessed.

I don’t think the next generation of brand love will be measured by followers, CTRs or dashboards alone. It will be measured by the distance between “I saw it online” and “I was there”. The job of communications has always been to make people believe. In the age of AI, belief no longer starts with polish. It starts with authenticity.