Could made by a human become a selling point?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

I was shopping recently with my 7-year-old, and he was drawn towards a relax-a-lottal.

It's a tea infuser, shaped like an axolotel, that sort of cute, sort of weird-looking aquatic animal.

It had a label designed in Rhode Island by people.

The company that makes the relaxolotl, Genuine Fred, told me they adopted the saying over a decade ago before AI was really in the conversation.

It was meant to signal there were real humans behind the ideas.

Now, though, the phrase has taken on new meaning.

The company does use AI as a tool, but says people are still at the center of its design process.

It made me wonder, could human involvement be highlighted more by brands in the future?

I talked about this with New York Institute of Technology Professor Colleen Kirk.

She studied how people respond to marketing messages created by AI.

In our research, we showed that labeling content as AI generated lowers consumer trust,

it lowers authenticity, it lowers their purchase intent, it lowers their positive word of

mouth.

And this is especially true in cases of emotional content, things that are supposed to be human and

that are kind of viewed as uniquely human tend to be viewed negatively when AI is used to

generate it. Are there certain types of products where consumers might be more resistant to an AI designer?

I think that if you look at the totality of the research, anything related to a consumer's

own identity, things they wear, things that are emotionally important to them, something

generated by an AI is going to be

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