AI video makes production faster and cheaper, but it raises new trust risks as YouTube fills with ads that audiences can’t easily tell are human-made.
Devin Pickell, Co-Founder of Creative Little Planet, frames the challenge as a trust test, where efficiency gains collide with consumer skepticism and weak platform rules.
Brands gain an edge by using AI to speed up internal workflows while keeping human judgment firmly in control of public-facing creative.
AI is moving fast into creative advertising, and video is where the trade-offs are most exposed. Production is suddenly cheaper and easier, but trust is becoming harder to hold onto. As YouTube pulls in more ad spend and creative starts to behave more like media, AI-generated video is shifting from a novelty to a default, reshaping how brands show up just as TV and streaming budgets keep shrinking.
Devin Pickell is a B2B content marketer with over a decade of experience in digital strategy. As the Co-Founder of the content collective Creative Little Planet, and with a history managing growth and SEO at SaaS companies like Privy, Nextiva, and G2, Pickell offers a perspective on the hype, the risks, and the real opportunities of AI in the creative process.
"Prominent brands like Base44 and Kalshi are already investing heavily in AI-generated YouTube ads, which makes it feel like only a matter of time before the platform is saturated with AI video," says Pickell. One of the main drivers for this trend is the historical difficulty of video production. For years, video has been a challenging and resource-intensive format for marketers. Now, the allure of AI is its promise to solve this bottleneck. High-profile brands like Kalshi are already proving the use case at scale, a trend enabled by companies offering AI-powered creative production tools that are changing the economics of advertising.
Hurry up and wait: But the rush toward efficiency isn't so simple. Consider the example of Coca-Cola's AI-revitalized campaign. The project required a lengthy creation process that calls into question the whole idea of AI-driven speed and cost savings. "It took about 70,000 prompts to get just sixty seconds of footage, and they then had to bring in several VFX artists for hundreds of hours to clean it up," notes Pickell. "So, from an efficiency standpoint, is it really that much more efficient? From a cost-savings standpoint, are you really saving that much money if you have to bring in outside staff to fix the mess?"
But to view the campaign as just a production failure is to miss the point, Pickell adds. Coca-Cola likely anticipated the difficulties and took a calculated risk, knowing the resulting buzz would be a marketing victory. "Their advertising team did their job," Pickell says. "The output is something that is being talked about in the advertising industry, and it's still being talked about. So it works."
I run myself into the ground?: The focus then turns to the consumer. As many brands rush to adopt AI, the public is growing more wary, with some feeling the technology is getting too close for comfort. The controversy around the viral "I run" song—which turned from a hit to a liability after its AI-generated vocals were revealed—serves as a case study. It sparks a discussion about whether online outrage is merely "performative" or if it has a real impact on purchasing decisions, a topic where research is just beginning to uncover nuanced consumer attitudes. "It begs the question: at the point of purchase, is that going to be a factor where someone abandons their cart because they can't support the brand's use of AI? Or is it really a non-issue altogether?"
No rules, no problem?: The trust issue is arguably compounded by a lack of platform-level governance. That void exists despite clear public sentiment for disclosure, with the vast majority of consumers wanting transparency. Pickell speculates there’s a simple financial motive behind the inaction. "Where are the guardrails? Is Google or YouTube going to require AI-generated ads to be flagged as such? As of right now, those rules don't exist. For platforms like YouTube, as long as a company is putting money behind an ad, why would they put up an additional roadblock to that revenue?"
The lack of external rules puts the responsibility for maintaining trust squarely on the brands themselves. In a shifting media environment with high-stakes leadership changes, the pressure to find efficiencies is high. In response, many brands are creating their own internal guardrails by splitting their approach: applying AI to improve internal efficiency while reserving human judgment for public-facing creative.
Pickell advocates for using AI for internal workflows, giving the example of building a custom GPT trained on a brand's style guide. Even as the advancing capabilities of AI video are clear, this "AI assistant," he explains, can be used by a copywriter to maintain brand consistency, speeding up the process without exposing unrefined AI creative to the public. "At the end of the day, AI or not, the work has to be authentic. It has to be considered through the human lens, not just spit out by an LLM," Pickell concludes.
As AI becomes more prevalent in the ad supply on YouTube, strategic advantage will likely come from knowing when to use AI for internal workflows and when to invest in human creative for public-facing work.
