A New York menswear company called Teddy Stratford recently ran a social media ad featuring a sharp-looking male model in a crisp summer shirt, standing on a boat against an urban skyline. The model, the boat, and the backdrop were all fake, conjured by generative artificial intelligence. The company's founder says the images look "really real." The question now landing on American consumers is whether that matters.
As CBS News reported, brands large and small are racing to adopt AI-generated imagery for marketing, or, in a telling counter-move, publicly pledging never to do so. The split reveals a deeper tension in American commerce: how much deception will the marketplace tolerate before trust breaks down?
Bryan Davis, the founder of Teddy Stratford, makes no apologies. He told CBS News the technology lets his small brand produce professional-grade images that would normally cost tens of thousands of dollars. No model. No photographer. No rooftop permit.
"We're not Calvin Klein, it's not like we could go out and spend $50,000 or $100,000 on a photoshoot."
Davis said AI also lets him assemble "a diverse crew of a dozen models" to represent his brand without the logistical headaches of coordinating real people. He called it "a huge win because we can show our product in a certain way, without spending money we don't have."
Nobody begrudges a small business owner for cutting costs. Free markets reward efficiency. But there's a difference between efficiency and fabrication, and when a brand puts a fake human being in front of you to sell a product, that line blurs fast.
Davis acknowledged the images "are not obviously AI." That's the point. The whole value proposition depends on fooling the viewer. If consumers could instantly spot the fakery, the images wouldn't work. The business model rests on a gap between what the customer sees and what's actually there.
That kind of gap, between appearance and reality, has a way of eroding trust across entire markets. When investors, consumers, or voters can't tell what's genuine, the honest operators suffer alongside the dishonest ones.
Tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini have made this kind of image generation accessible to virtually anyone with a laptop. The barrier to entry for manufacturing fake marketing content is now close to zero. That's a remarkable technological achievement. It's also a remarkable opportunity for deception at scale.
Not every company is rushing to replace real people with pixels. Aerie, the intimate apparel brand owned by American Eagle Outfitters, has taken the opposite approach. The company posted a statement on its website drawing a hard line.
"In 2014, we stopped retouching people and bodies. In 2025, we recommitted to never use AI to generate bodies or change the people and bodies in our images."
Aerie went further, framing its stance as a consumer promise: "You deserve REAL in every image, every store & every moment. We believe transparency isn't a trend. It's our promise to you. No retouching. No AI. Because REAL MATTERS."
Last month, Aerie debuted an ad campaign featuring actress Pamela Anderson, a real person, crafting AI prompts to create lifelike models. The campaign appeared designed to highlight the contrast between generated images and authentic ones. The message was clear: we know the technology exists, and we're choosing not to use it on you.
Coterie, a diaper company, struck a blunter tone. The brand pledged not to generate content using AI and posted on Instagram: "AI can't change a diaper." The company's broader statement framed it simply: "Parenting is as real as it gets. We believe our content should be, too."
These pledges are smart marketing. They're also an implicit admission that AI-generated ads have become common enough to warrant a public opt-out. When brands start advertising their honesty, it tells you something about the neighborhood.
Chris Gillett, a professional headshot photographer, raised a point that cuts deeper than aesthetics. He told CBS News that some AI-generated images can look "startlingly real." But others, he said, "just feel off, or weird."
The bigger concern, Gillett argued, is what happens to human connection when the people in images don't exist.
"I can look at an image of a happy couple, and I'm empathizing. But if I know those people are fake, I don't think I am going to empathize with them."
That observation deserves more attention than it's getting. Advertising has always involved persuasion, staging, and selective presentation. But there's a difference between a real model wearing a real shirt in a styled photograph and a machine hallucinating a person who never drew breath. One is presentation. The other is invention.
Gillett put a finer point on the cultural stakes. "We're so disconnected now as it is, because phones are a filter between us and other humans, and now we just made it worse," he said. In an era when public trust in institutions and public figures keeps cratering, layering another tier of artificial unreality onto daily life seems like a poor bet.
Still, Gillett expressed some optimism. "I have hope that human yearning for authenticity and authentic human connection will prevail and keep us from running completely off the rails with this stuff," he said.
Conservatives who believe in free markets should welcome competition between brands that use AI and brands that don't. Let consumers vote with their wallets. That's how it's supposed to work.
But markets function on information. A buyer can't make a rational choice if she doesn't know the "model" wearing the shirt she's about to purchase is a digital phantom generated by a prompt. The free market doesn't work when one side of the transaction is built on a fiction the other side can't detect.
Right now, there's no requirement for brands to disclose AI-generated imagery in ads. Davis himself noted that his images are "not obviously AI." That's not transparency. That's the opposite.
The pattern is familiar. When institutions, whether government agencies funneling money through self-dealing schemes or tech-savvy brands manufacturing fake spokespeople, operate without accountability, ordinary people pay the price. Models lose work. Photographers lose clients. Consumers lose the ability to trust what they see.
And the workers displaced aren't abstractions. They're the real models who used to earn a living standing in front of a camera. The real photographers who built careers on craft and skill. AI doesn't just cut costs for small brands. It cuts people out of the economy.
Davis frames it as a scrappy underdog story, a small business competing against Calvin Klein. Fair enough. But when the scrappy underdog's competitive advantage is that customers can't tell his ads are fabricated, the sympathy thins.
Aerie and Coterie are betting that consumers will reward honesty. That bet reflects a real appetite. Americans are tired of being manipulated, by algorithms, by institutions, by public figures who play fast and loose with other people's money and trust.
The brands drawing lines in the sand understand something the AI enthusiasts may be missing. People don't just buy products. They buy from people they trust. Strip out the human element, and you strip out the trust.
Whether the market ultimately rewards the Teddy Stratfords or the Aeries will say something about where American consumers draw their own lines. The technology isn't going away. The question is whether we'll demand to know when it's being used on us, or whether we'll shrug and scroll past another fake face selling a real shirt.
A market built on images no one can trust isn't a free market. It's a con with better graphics.
