the myth of authenticity as labor preservation
I wanted to connect with top local agencies to discuss the ideas and concepts that I felt might be important, such as the state of advertising and the erosion of presence that I’ve written about before. But the conversations didn’t stay there for long. These meetings turned toward something else. Toward people. Toward what happens when the systems that employ them start to change.
Instead of discussing advertising, I ended up talking about the conditions that sustain it and how those conditions are shifting.
Advertising/marketing agencies have always been a labor-heavy industry. Across most sectors, human capital represents 20 to 40 percent of cost. In advertising, it’s closer to 70%. That imbalance once made sense. Creativity used to be a manual process: concepting, writing, shooting, editing, selling. But the industry’s true product has never been ads, it has been people. Layers of specialists translating one form of attention into another.
AI is now correcting that human capital imbalance. Not by destroying jobs, but by collapsing the tiered creative class that made the system work. AI is less a disruption than an inevitability.
Inside agencies, this shift manifests as a moral stance. The most visible example are policies along the lines of: don’t depict people in AI-generated work. This is also present across industry-wide discussions, specifically J. Crew.
On the surface, it’s about authenticity - protecting human representation and creative integrity. But underneath, it’s something else. Refusing to use AI imagery functions as a moral firewall between the technology outside and the people inside.
What exactly counts as real in this context?
We call an image authentic when it features a paid actor, a model, a photographer and a designer working inside Adobe’s software stack, yet every one of those layers is a mediation. The actor performs a version of humanity written by someone else. The Influencer is directed to evoke sincerity on command. The final image is sculpted through digital tools that correct, composite, and fabricate. In other words, authenticity has always been staged.
The distinction between “AI” and “real” dissolves under inspection. Both are forms of synthesis, both rely on software. The difference is political, not aesthetic. One keeps people employed while the other threatens to make them optional. When agencies and clients insist that AI images are “fake,” they are not defending the truth of the image, they are defending the economic system that produces it.
In this case, the issue isn’t what’s shown in the image but who still occupies the payroll that produces it. The policy comforts both staff and clients by asserting that something recognizably human still anchors the process. Authenticity becomes a managerial safeguard, defending payroll under the language of ethics.
AI is easy to demonize. It lacks empathy, it fabricates faces, it threatens originality. These objections sound moral but operate as self-preservation. I don’t believe agencies and their clients fear the loss of creativity but they fear the loss of intermediation. AI flattens the layers that once justified headcount. The goal of an “AI-free” label is not meant to preserve truth, but hierarchy.
Authenticity has shifted from aesthetic to economic function. It signifies human participation.
The actor’s face, the model’s gesture, the editor’s hand are all are proxies for labor. We call them “real” because someone was paid to make them. We defend authenticity because it affirms that people still matter in a system increasingly indifferent to their necessity.
Advertising is simply the most visible case of a larger correction. Industries built on symbolic labor such as media, consulting and design are all using authenticity to buy time. When “authenticity” becomes a strategy, I believe it signals that a system is negotiating its own redundancy.
AI is not ending creativity. But it is ending the administrative excess that surrounded it.
The myth of authenticity endures because it disguises structural change as moral principle. It allows industries to say they are defending truth, when in reality they are defending the payroll.
But authenticity has never saved an industry. It only delays its reckoning. The future of creative work will not hinge on who makes the image, but on who defines its purpose and consequence.
