Consumers just flipped on AI content

In 2023, 60% of consumers said they preferred AI-generated creator content. By mid-2025, that number was 26%.

That's a 34-point drop in two years. It happened while 79% of marketers were increasing their spending on AI content, according to Billion Dollar Boy's research surveying 6,000 consumers, creators, and marketers across the US and UK.

Marketers are spending more on AI content. Consumers want less of it.

Both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society landed on the same 2025 Word of the Year: "slop." 

Merriam-Webster defines it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

The scale of the backlash backs them up. Meltwater's social listening data tracked over 461,000 mentions of "AI slop" in 2024 across social platforms, forums, and news. 

By November 2025, that number crossed 2.4 million, a 9x jump in one year. Negative sentiment peaked at 54% in October.

This is no longer scattered frustration. Consumers have a shared vocabulary for the problem, and they're using it.

McDonald's Netherlands released a 45-second Christmas ad in December 2025, generated entirely by AI. 

Three days later, they pulled it.

The production company, The Sweetshop, defended the work. CEO Melanie Bridge told Futurism the team "hardly slept" for seven weeks creating "thousands of takes." 

She insisted, "This wasn't an AI trick. It was a film."

The audience wasn't persuaded. 

Viewers called it "creepy," "soulless," and "inauthentic." McDonald's Netherlands called the backlash "an important learning as we explore the effective use of AI."

They're not an outlier. Coca-Cola hit similar resistance with AI holiday campaigns in both 2024 and 2025. 

Pinterest had to build filtering tools after months of users demanding a way to remove AI-generated images from their feeds.

Thomas Walters, Chief Innovation Officer at Billion Dollar Boy, was direct in their November 2025 report: "Mass produced, unlabelled, and poorly conceived AI 'slop' is driving the negative sentiment we are seeing."

The internal data tells the same story. 

73% of marketers believe their AI content outperforms traditional content. 

Only 26% of consumers prefer it.

The backlash is doing something more interesting than just eroding trust. It's creating a pricing opportunity.

Lippincott's 2026 trend report identified this directly. Eric Tsytsylin, Partner in Strategy, wrote that "'human-made' will resurface as a badge of honor and a driver of price premiums for knowledge workers and craftspeople alike."

CNN predicted 2026 as the year of "100% human" marketing. iHeartMedia's own research found 90% of its listeners want their media created by humans, even listeners who use AI tools themselves.

"Consumers are not just looking for convenience, they're searching for meaning," iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman said in a statement this fall.

On the content side, HubSpot's 2025 Social Media Marketing Report found that 76% of consumers said authentic, relatable content matters more to them than polished, high-production-value content.

All of this points in the same direction for creative entrepreneurs. The provenance of your content, the visible proof that a thinking person made it, now carries economic weight. 

That differentiation shows up everywhere it matters: whether someone opens your email or archives it, clicks your link or scrolls past, buys from you or from the cheaper alternative. Human origin is becoming a conversion factor.

This isn't an argument against using AI. 

AI is a legitimate tool for workflow automation, data analysis, and testing. 

But when it comes to the content that builds trust, specifically the trust that turns an audience into buyers, AI-generated output is losing ground. 

If your competitors are flooding feeds with AI content to save money, and their audiences are tuning out, you need to be the one they still believe and can connect with.

The entrepreneurs and brands who establish themselves as unmistakably human now will own that positioning by the time the rest of the market catches up.