Five months after Pepsi used the Super Bowl to needle Coca-Cola over its AI-generated Christmas ads, the rivalry has become shorthand for a question the two companies' customers are already deciding on their own: what happens to an ad once people can tell a machine made it?
In November 2024, Coke released AI-generated Christmas ads reworking its 1995 "Holidays Are Coming" campaign, built with generative video instead of actors and real trucks. The backlash was immediate. Viewers called the ads soulless, flagged warped hands and glitchy backgrounds, and argued a company that size shouldn't cut corners on something so central to its identity. When Coke ran more AI holiday ads in 2025, the reaction repeated: some viewers called for a boycott, others joked it was free advertising for Pepsi.
Pepsi took the opening. At Super Bowl LX in February 2026, it aired "The Choice," directed by Taika Waititi—who also cameos as a therapist—in which Coca-Cola's own polar bear takes a blind taste test, picks Pepsi and spirals into an identity crisis, set to Queen's "I Want to Break Free." The bear is computer-generated, but Pepsi pointedly cast the ad as human craft over AI, a direct jab at its rival. "If there's something we care about and we believe in, it's in the craft and the creativity of our people," Pepsi's marketing vice president, Gustavo Reyna, then said.
Haeum Shon, an 18-year-old design student, watched the fallout, and it changed how she saw Coca-Cola. "It degraded Coca-Cola's image," she said of the 2024 ad, "since they, despite their prominence, sacrificed their quality to rush creation." Learning the company had reportedly turned to AI to save time and money sharpened her disappointment: a brand that size, she felt, should have spent on something that strengthened it, not chased a trend at its own expense.
But the bigger tell isn't a Super Bowl ad. It's the ads young people scroll past every day. James Lee, a 20-year-old university student, doubts the Pepsi-Coke skirmish has changed how companies actually use AI in advertising. When Lee tried to order kimchi on Coupang Eats, he found listings that promised the product was "made with a mother's care." The image beside the promise wasn't a real photo of anyone's mother. It was AI-generated. "I thought that was a weird sense of marketing," Lee said, "especially since the company was using it to replace the idea of a motherly figure, which embodies love and care." An AI image, to Lee, can't carry that, so using one to sell something so bound up with a mother's love felt self-defeating. He scrolled past it, and past the next AI kimchi ad that followed. His mother ended up buying from a seller who happened not to have used AI at all.
It's a small purchase, but it captures what the students interviewed for this article kept returning to. Few reject AI in advertising outright: several use it daily, and some can name places it belongs. What they reject seems narrower. AI standing in for something meant to carry human meaning, and doing it badly.
Lee isn't an outlier. In the United States, a February 2026 survey of 1,000 Gen Z adults by the research firm Attest found nearly three-quarters held negative or wary views of AI-generated content, many of them saying "AI slop" was dragging down quality.
A similar pattern appears in South Korea, where a January 2026 survey of 1,200 consumers found that younger people were far more likely to prefer ads made without AI: 73.5 percent of teenagers preferred human-made advertisements, compared with 42 percent of respondents in their 40s.
For some, the recoil is close to automatic. Sarang Hong, a 19-year-old student in Korea, sees AI ads constantly on Instagram Reels and scrolls past almost all of them. "I think authenticity definitely drops when you use AI in your ads," she said. "Honestly, it feels irritating." Reaching for AI reads to her as a shortcut, a sign a brand didn't think its audience was worth the effort. If she found out a brand used AI to advertise its products, she said, she'd trust the brand a lot less.
Young people have noticed the places where AI falls behind humans in marketing. Shon frames this as laziness on the part of the companies. Media used to take real time, she says, and that time signaled a brand's investment in the people watching; AI collapses it to almost nothing, and she can feel the difference. She's fine with AI where the image was always going to be synthetic—app graphics, or expensive scenes filmmakers already build with CGI. But for anything built around visible human effort, like stop-motion, the fact that a person assembled every frame by hand is part of the meaning, and AI can't stand in for it.
Lee draws his line by industry: he'd trust AI least in music, architecture, healthcare, safety and beauty, where he thinks the human element can't be swapped out.
Soohyun Shim, an 18-year-old high school graduate, disagrees on at least one count. She thinks AI could work in cosmetics ads, which often rely on static shots, but not sports ads, where movement is central and AI quality tends to fall apart. She separates products she can check after buying from those whose value rests on trusting the ad itself, and worries AI tends to oversell a product's effectiveness in ways human-made ads don't.
But many young people don't want AI hidden. Hong said she'd rather AI ads be labeled outright, so the disclosure is built into the process. The research points the same way: clear labeling is one of the few things shown to improve how consumers feel about AI ads—yet most companies that use generative AI don't disclose it every time, even as a large majority of consumers say they want it labeled.
What young people reject is AI used instead of care rather than in service of it: a mother's hands replaced by a synthetic image, a 40-year-old holiday tradition replaced by something that looks unfinished. For a generation that grew up able to spot the difference, that substitution is the first thing they notice. And, like Lee's mother choosing the seller who didn't use AI, the first thing they scroll past.