Decoding the AI Revolution — and Backlash — of UGC
What Brand Marketers Need to Know
The State of UGC
User-generated content (UGC), or creator content, has been steadily reshaping the media landscape, capturing audience attention at scale and competing head-to-head with professionally produced content for time, engagement, and cultural relevance. What was once considered casual or amateur content — vlogs, reaction videos, unboxing videos, comedy sketches, and memes — has matured into a powerful content category in its own right.
Case in point: 56% of Gen Zs and 43% of millennials surveyed by Deloitte in early 2025 reported that UGC content on social media is more relevant to them than traditional media content like TV shows and movies; Gen Z are spending 54% more time — or about 50 minutes more — than the average consumer per day on social platforms and watching UGC, the report found.
This trend is also corroborated by the shift in time spent on platforms. For example, last year, TikTok users spent around 58 minutes and 24 seconds on average per day on the platform consuming user-generated video content — a figure that has more than doubled since 2019. Meanwhile, the time spent watching Netflix only grew by less than 9 minutes over the five-year period.
Marketers have long been tapping into UGC for both eyeballs and cultural relevance. Yet, UGC-driven influencer marketing, once the darling of digital strategy, is facing a moment of reckoning. The sheen of aspirational lifestyles and perfectly curated feeds is wearing off. Today’s audiences — particularly younger demographics — are becoming disenchanted with overproduced content, repetitive brand deals, and what feels like a lack of genuine connection. According to recent YPulse survey data, 61% of 13–39-year-olds say they trust influencers less as the number of ads they post increases.
As trust wanes in conventional influencers, smaller creators with niche audiences are becoming more valuable. Micro-influencers may thrive in this environment, as brands prioritize trust and conversion over raw follower counts.
Looking ahead, more content creators will likely embrace alternative platforms such as Discord and Substack that puts the emphasis on deeper community connections and meaningful engagement over broad but shallow reach, so that they can better foster smaller but more intimate communities, away from the algorithm-heavy feeds of TikTok and Instagram. As a recent survey by The Verge on the shifting digital landscape concludes: the future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences; And though AI is powerful, it is not always welcome.
The Dawn of AI Co-Creation
Overlaying all of this is the explosion of generative AI-powered creative tools. Generative AI has dramatically lowered the barriers to high-quality content creation. In fact, 90% of creators believe AI tools will help them save time and money, per a recent Adobe survey. But the tech’s rise also brings unease. Many creators remain concerned about their work being scraped to train AI models without consent.
More importantly, these AI tools are also lowering the entry barrier for content creation. No longer is professional-grade gear or technical know-how a prerequisite to create viral or polished content. Now, it’s about who can develop the most compelling concept, and finding the right prompts to bring them to life through multimodal AI models. We’ve already seen the cultural spread of AI content — most recently, Studio Ghibli-style AI-generated images flooded social feeds after OpenAI’s latest image model launch.
But this democratization of content creation hasn’t come without backlash. Critics argue that as AI-generated media floods digital spaces, it risks diluting the value of human creativity and originality. The aforementioned Ghibli-style AI-generated images, for instance, reignited the debate around the merits of AI art — while some admired the visual fidelity and nostalgic charm, others saw it as a cheap imitation that commodifies the painstaking craft of traditional animation. Artists and fans alike voiced concerns that such tools blur the line between homage and appropriation, especially when iconic aesthetic styles are mimicked without consent or contribution from the original creators. This tension between polished, AI-assisted creativity and raw, human-centered expression will define the next wave of UGC.
Another noteworthy brewing disruption stems from the emergence of AI avatars and virtual influencers. These synthetic personalities are already commanding large audiences, offering brands a scalable and tightly controlled alternative to human talent. But with that scalability comes scrutiny. Virtual influencers raise urgent questions about representation, labor, and authenticity. AI companions, like those from Replika or Character.AI, are blurring the line between entertainment and emotional connection, making the parasocial nature of influencer culture even more intimate — and possibly more manipulative.
Perhaps in the near future, real-time, multimodal AI will allow virtual influencers to engage audiences dynamically, simulating conversation and forging deeper relationships. For marketers, this means rethinking what it means to build brand trust in a world where not every persona is real.
Understanding the Nuances of the AI Backlash
In order to keep up with the AI revolution happening in UGC and stay competitive, Hollywood is also starting to experiment — albeit cautiously — with generative AI tools. The Russo brothers have announced a new studio to support creators using AI for budget-friendly production, while Lionsgate has partnered with AI firm Runway to explore how generative tools can remix their content library. Understandably, most creative professionals in the industry remain wary of AI, and unions continue to push for protections around things like digital likeness and voice cloning.
More importantly, consumers have pushed back against the use of generative AI in marketing due to concerns over authenticity and ethical treatment of creators. In general, people tend to find AI-generated creatives to be awkward and lazy, reinforcing the perception that brands are cutting corners at the expense of authentic connection. Case in point, A24’s promotion for its 2024 film Civil War, which featured AI-generated imagery, drew criticism for being weird and tone-deaf.
For better or for worse, consumers are demanding that brands treat AI as a tool for enhancement — not replacement — and expect acknowledgment when human creativity is being co-opted. According to a recent study by Click Consult, 57% of people say they trust human-generated content more than AI-generated content.
Looking ahead, this backlash is likely to evolve into a demand for ethical, credit-aware use of AI in marketing. The tolerance for low-effort “AI slop” is already fading quickly, especially as audiences become more adept at recognizing generic content, and the bar for what resonates is rising. Audiences aren’t rejecting AI outright — they’re rejecting unconsidered use of it.
The nuance here, however, is that there will be more grace shown toward independent creators who use AI as a collaborative tool — because it’s perceived as empowering rather than exploitative. The distinction is clear: people resent when big studios use AI to cut costs and sideline human talent, but they’re open to creators using it to unlock new forms of expression.
To navigate the evolving landscape of AI backlash, brand marketers need to adopt a thoughtful, transparent, and human-centered approach to their use of generative tools. The key isn’t to avoid AI — it’s to use it with intention and integrity. That means recognizing the nuances in public sentiment: people aren’t opposed to AI itself, but to how it’s used, especially when it feels like a shortcut taken at the expense of creativity, effort, or fair compensation.
