It was supposed to be the future. It was marketed as magic. But now, in the spring of 2025, some of the world’s top brands are quietly—and in some cases, loudly—walking away from AI.
Not entirely, of course. That’s the part that makes this all the more bleak. They can’t walk away. The systems are too embedded. The workflows too dependent. But they’re pulling back from what was supposed to be AI’s golden promise: personalization at scale, infinite content, predictive perfection. Why? Because it’s backfiring.
via Sora
Marketers are finding that AI-driven personalization is actually alienating customers. Too many predictive prompts, too many cookie-cutter replies, too many interactions that feel like talking to an intern who’s read your entire diary. “The creep factor is real,” one executive admitted. “Consumers are weirded out.”
Even worse, internal teams are reporting “AI fatigue.” What was once thrilling has become exhausting. Generative tools flood the pipeline with options no one has time to sift through. The creative spark—the messy human stuff—is buried under prompt logs, model outputs, and brand-safe rewrites. Entire teams are burning out trying to manage the very thing that was meant to save them.
The AI-generated content glut is also polluting brand equity. One agency exec told Marketing Brew their client’s voice “got so diluted it was indistinguishable from a dozen competitors.” Why? Because everyone’s using the same models, fine-tuned or not, and those models are all trained on the same linguistic sludge.
I have found it problematic to maintain the initial creative spark when I cannot render that “moment” though I’ve spent most of a weekend having Frankenstein do something one might consider quite basic and still not coming close to the finish line. At some point you give up and wait for the update.
And yet, even as brands begin to “break up” with AI, there’s no clean exit. Their customer service systems are built on chatbots. Their content engines run on AI copy. Their data teams rely on predictive tools. It’s not a breakup—it’s a reluctant entanglement. And the deeper fear? They’re no longer sure where the human brand ends and the synthetic one begins.
We’re watching an identity crisis unfold in real time—one where the tools built to help brands tell their story are now rewriting that story without asking for permission.
Sources:
Marketing Brew
TechCrunch: Brands Retreat from AI-Driven Strategies
Ad Age: AI Fatigue Sets In
A cube farm
Jun 03, 2025
“Visual Storyteller”
Chaos fatigue is real and it’s burning us out: … burnout mentions in Glassdoor rose 34% from Q1 ’24 to Q1 ’25 (research linked below)
I made a couple of changes to insulate myself from the chaos: 1. I turned off _all_ push notifications as a baseline and 2. I reduced the flood of news to a trickle by restricting myself to one brief daily news summary.
What are y’all doing to muffle the constant noise? Any other tips?
Turning off notifications has been incredibly freeing for me. I never realized how much I was constantly checking, and checking, and checking all of my different social and communication feeds just because of those dang notifications! Turning them off has been a game-changer.
“Strategy Director 1”
Getting divorced, that should bring me substantial peace.
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The infatuation with generative AI in marketing has entered its next phase—not expansion, but retraction. A growing number of brands and agencies are scaling back, rethinking, or outright freezing their use of generative tools. Why? Because beneath the automation promises and productivity gains lies a festering truth:
Teams face an overwhelming glut of content options, variants, and prompt iterations. Once praised for “speed to concept,” AI has morphed into a monster of endless drafts, each more indistinct than the last. Instead of enabling creative vision, it’s paralyzing it. If AI saves time on execution, let’s do more versions.
Even worse, AI is eroding trust—internally and externally. Internally, teams are divided over what constitutes “authentic” output. Executives love AI’s efficiency, but creatives feel stripped of purpose. “We’re not artists anymore,” one agency veteran confessed, “we’re prompt editors.” Externally, consumers are catching on—and tuning out. AI-generated content has become so prevalent, and so uniform, that it’s triggering brand apathy. What once felt futuristic now feels disposable.
Legal risks are also rising fast. With deepfake ad scandals and disclosure laws becoming daily headlines, brands are facing a new fear: liability. A misattributed image, an undisclosed AI headline, or a misfiring chatbot could now lead to public backlash—or worse, government penalties (in theory but doubtful). With Congress pressing for AI regulation at the state level, 50 disparate AI playbooks is a sh*tshow unto itself. The AI industry has 50 customers to pitch against on another for investment. But this is for another day.
Teams are burned out managing automation. The pressure to “keep up with the bots” has created an arms race of content quantity at the cost of quality, clarity, and human connection.
The pivot away from AI is not universal—but it is widespread and sobering. The initial euphoria is giving way to realism, and that realism is harsh: AI didn’t save the industry. It complicated it. Confused it. In some cases, corrupted it.
And so, the brakes are being applied. But the question remains: is it too late to course-correct? Or are we simply slowing down on a track already laid by the machines?
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Sources:
Marketing Brew
VentureBeat: AI Use Pullback in Marketing
Adweek: Fatigue and Fear Slow AI Growth in Adland
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