Consumer Responses to AI-Generated Charitable Giving Ads

Content created by employing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, also known as synthetic content, promises to radically change the advertising and marketing landscape in the coming decades, presumably for the better. It is fundamental for advertising and marketing scholars and practitioners to have solid knowledge of how synthetic content is perceived by consumers before widespread adoption is promoted. Across three experimental studies we tested how consumers in charitable giving contexts reacted to advertising messages featuring content generated by an AI neural network. We show that potential donors responded differently to children’s faces when they knew they had been generated by AI. Study 1 established that awareness of the falsity of a face or its status as an AI-generated image has a negative impact on donation intentions. This negative impact is serially mediated by empathy and anticipatory guilt and empathy and emotion perception. Study 2 investigated several motives for employing AI-generated images and indicated that charities employing those images can benefit by making their ethical motives salient. Finally, Study 3 revealed that under extraordinary circumstances the use of AI images by charities is considered acceptable by consumers and is likely to lead to similar outcomes as the use of real images. Therefore, we recommend a cautious approach to the adoption of synthetic content.