Last night I was watching Ari Melber on The Beat. He delivered a special report on big tech seizing people's creative work — specifically, how AI companies have used the verbal and visual output of the human race as training material for their models, without copyright consideration or compensation. It's a story that's gaining legislative traction: there are now bipartisan bills in Congress pushing back, and Senator Josh Hawley has described AI companies' use of copyrighted material as "the largest intellectual property theft in American history."

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Melber's framing was about labor and creators. It made me start thinking about truth in advertising.

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The problem nobody in branding is talking about honestly yet is this: If AI companies built their models on the creative and intellectual output of humanity and now brands are using those same models to generate their imagery, their copy, their UGC, and in some cases their founder narratives, how is the consumer supposed to know what is generated versus produced and what is real versus optimized?

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The ethics will eventually sort itself out. The trust, I'm not so sure about.

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Trust has always been the underlying currency of a strong brand. Not awareness, not aesthetics, not distribution. Just trust. Consumers buy things they believe in, return to things they rely on, and advocate for things they feel are honest with them. AI is inflating the supply of brand content while devaluing that currency.

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What makes this particularly important for the beauty and luxury space is that the category spent years developing visual and verbal cues specifically designed to communicate authenticity. From raw photography to founder stories. Ingredient transparency to clinical specificity. These were all attempts to say: this is real, this comes from somewhere, you can trust it.

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Those signals are now as reproducible as everything they were meant to distinguish from.

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When the cues of truth become synthetic, consumers are left with nothing to orient by except price and word of mouth. The two oldest trust mechanisms in business. Which is ironic, because all the sophistication in branding, all the investment in identity and design and storytelling, was supposed to move us beyond that.

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Regulatory frameworks around truth in advertising were built for a different era. The FTC wasn't designed for a world where a brand can generate a testimonial, a before-and-after, a founder moment, or a clinical-looking ingredient claim in seconds. The rules are not keeping up.

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And brands building on synthetic foundations — ones where the content looks credible but the source is a model trained on everyone else's work — are sitting on more risk than they recognize. Because consumers are getting sharper. The same visual literacy that makes them respond to good branding will eventually make them smell the replica. And when trust breaks at the brand level, it doesn't come back easily.

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The question I keep returning to is this: if your brand's voice was built by a model trained on every other brand's voice, what exactly are you saying? And who said it first?