New York’s AI Disclosure Law Is a Reckoning for Lazy Brands

Synthetic performers and consumer trust

By Eric Fulwiler, Co-founder & CEO, Rival

When New York’s synthetic performer disclosure law went into effect in early June, it became the first state to require advertisers to clearly disclose when they use synthetic performers instead of human actors.

While the legislation was opposed by various technology and marketing industry associations, its underlying intent is sound. It’s easy to understand why consumer groups and SAG-AFTRA have celebrated its implementation and why other states are considering similar laws. But the group that should be cheering the loudest often isn’t discussed: the brands and agencies that have already been using AI the right way. 

Or to put it another way, this law is a necessary reaction to all those marketers who got caught up in the hype cycle and forgot the fundamentals of what makes good and effective advertising.

What’s the real impact of AI?

New York’s law didn’t come out of nowhere. For the past three years, numerous brands and agencies have been leveraging AI for so-called efficiency gains, dressing up their use of synthetic performers as innovation.

But let’s get real. Synthetic performers proliferated because they’re cheaper and faster, not better. By lowering production barriers dramatically, AI created an incentive to swap out real humans for AI-generated ones. Many brands chose to do this, but they failed to ask what the tradeoff was and whether there was a hidden cost.

So, when industry groups say that New York’s law punishes innovation, they’re off base. What it really punishes is the conflation of efficiency with strategy. They’re not the same thing. Effective marketing isn’t about pursuing efficiency or innovation for their own sake. It’s about creating value for customers in ways that drive growth. This appears to have slipped their minds.

The deeper problem is what synthetic performers have done to the implicit contract between brands and consumers: the assumption that what you’re watching reflects something real about what a brand stands for. 

Marketers will point to studies that show that most consumers can’t reliably distinguish AI-generated faces from real ones. You might want to believe that, but you know it isn’t true. Most AI-produced advertising simply does not pass the sniff test. That AI smell is real.

What’s not debatable is that people still value authenticity, differentiation, and relevance—the things that have always made for effective advertising. It’s about the value and impact you create through advertising, not the methods you use to get there. 

Using AI the right way

The truth is there’s really no harm in disclosing when a brand is using an AI-created performer instead of a human one. And it won’t result in a ban on AI in advertising. That’s a reactionary position that feels just as lazy as the corner-cutting it’s reacting to. 

It all comes down to how AI gets used. Human judgement is—and always will be—critical to determining what will add value for the consumer. AI technology will increasingly become commoditized, but human judgement and taste won’t. 

Brands and agencies using AI most effectively are building human-orchestrated, AI-powered workflows, where strategy, taste, and creative intent remain human while AI accelerates execution. They understand that the opportunity with AI is not in short-term efficiency gains and doing the same things faster and cheaper. The technology’s true power is in redesigning the entire model with a focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. 

That’s what responsible AI advertising means in practice. This next-generation model will enable marketers to do things they couldn’t before. It will unlock formerly inaccessible value. And we don’t know what that will look like. It’s like we’re reliving the Internet of 1999, focusing on Pets.com while the next Amazon is quietly being built in the background.

Regulatory dominoes like New York’s law will continue to fall. But this isn’t a compliance issue. Disclosure requirements won’t end the use of synthetic performers in advertising—and they might not even slow it down. But it does give consumers another signal to decide who they trust. And it starts to make visible the distinction between brands using AI to build something better and brands using AI to spend less. That’s certainly something worth celebrating.

By Eric Fulwiler, Co-founder & CEO, Rival

Source: Rival

  Agency, AI, Eric Fulwiler, Opinion Piece, Rival