There’s a certain kind of dread that hits when a brand video tries to be human and lands somewhere closer to “animated corporate hostage proof-of-life.” Consumers say they’re seeing AI video everywhere, and they’re describing it the way people describe a bad first date: stiff gestures, weird voice, no emotional read. The uncanny valley used to just be a tech problem. Now, it’s also a marketing one.

In the State of Video 2026 report from Animoto, a cloud-based video creation service, close to 83% of survey respondents say they’ve watched a video they suspect was AI-generated — pointing to robotic gestures (67% of survey respondents), unnatural voices (55%), and a lack of emotional tone (51%). And Animoto’s report shows that’s getting turned into a business consequence: 36% of consumers say AI-generated brand videos lower their perception of the brand. That’s a lot of downside for a so-called workflow upgrade.

Or as Animoto said in its TLDR: “In an era where anyone can make a video with AI, audiences still crave what’s real.”

The new brand risk is a weird voice

For marketers, the ground has shifted under the content calendar: The tools can make video faster than ever, and audiences have gotten faster at deciding it feels wrong. Eighty-four percent of marketers surveyed by Animoto, which is owned by Redbrick, the parent company of Quartz, said they’re using AI in their video creation process, and more than 75% said they use it frequently. The adoption curve has collapsed into a moment where “experimental” is becoming “default.” But when the cost of a slip is trust, “move fast” stops sounding like a strategy.

“I think we come at [AI] from two angles,” said Lucas Killcoyne, Animoto’s senior product marketing manager. “There’s one where it’s: How are we approaching AI as a company that is living in a world where AI is rapidly getting incorporated into every single piece of technology that you use. And then, as a company that caters to individuals who are wondering about the very same questions that we are, is it OK to use this miracle pill? Is this miracle pill actually a miracle pill? How does it impact the way that my audience perceives me?”

Those same surveyed marketers, though, don’t sound particularly starry-eyed about handing the keys over to AI. They want AI as an assistant, not an author. Animoto found in this year’s report that 90% of marketers say it’s essential that they can edit AI-generated content, 95% insist that their branding must be reflected, and 99% say that the brand personality has to shine through. That reads a lot like a collective effort to avoid putting out content that technically ships, technically “scales,” and still lands as generic, off-putting, or just kind of weird.

Chelly Wood, an Animoto user since 2012, said in the report that “it’s not fun to hear AI voices. It feels like I’m listening to an overhead speaker of pre-recorded messages instead of a real person. If I can’t tell who created the AI-generated material, I’m a lot less likely to trust what it offers.” Generative tools are good at averaging. But branding is the fight against averaging. Branding is personality.

An AI workflow can shave hours off production — but deliver something that feels generic, or worse, eerie. The audience doesn’t experience “workflow.” The audience experiences the output, and it attaches the output to the brand. Here, then, the fastest failure mode is a human voice that doesn’t actually sound like a human. A face that moves like a puppet. A performance that hits the words and entirely misses the feeling. (Although Animoto warns that video creation is moving so quickly that those tells could be dated within a month or two.) AI disclosure doesn’t automatically solve any problems, either: Research has found that labeling content as AI-generated can reduce trust and attitudes in some settings.

“We all kind of want to personalize what we’re looking to make and create,” Animoto’s director of project management Raleigh Matern said, “and I just can’t imagine a world, especially in a creative space like video creation, where that isn’t true and people don’t want something that’s unique and tailored to them.”

AI is now part of the consumer’s interpretation of intent. A viewer who suspects AI may read the content as cheaper, lazier, less accountable, or simply less human — and a brand that hands them that kind of content has already lost control of the story. So the “attention economy,” where everyone is vying for the scarce attention of their target audiences, is shifting to a “trust economy,” where everyone is vying for the scarce trust of their target audiences.

More video, less patience — and higher stakes

So why are marketers taking the risk with AI at all? Because video keeps working. Animoto found that 82% of consumers say video is the most memorable form of content, 86% say they prefer to learn about a brand through video, and 83% say they’ve bought something after watching a brand video. Those are the kind of numbers that make executives treat video as a format that still earns budget without a fight. But those numbers also explain why AI is so tempting: When the format performs, the obvious next instruction is “make more.”

But that’s easier said than done — especially if you want “more” to also be “good.” Matern said he had one of his team members play around and try to create a video using one of the popular AI generators, and it took that person 2,000 prompts to come up with a “good” video, which they could have made in about 20 minutes on their own. Matern added that a common prompt now when using AI is “don’t make this look or sound like AI,” which might just be the whole era in one line: hide the bot.

Animoto’s data doesn’t paint consumers as anti-AI zealots. The data shows that they’re jumpy, judgmental, and newly fluent in a specific genre of what they’re calling wrongness. Animoto is careful to note that “suspected AI” use is the operative phrase. Perception is doing the damage. That aligns with what broader public polling is picking up, too. In a September 2025 Pew Research Center survey, most Americans said it’s important to be able to tell whether content was made by AI or humans, while many also said they don’t trust themselves to spot it reliably. Brands don’t need audiences to be correct. They need them to feel safe.

Madeline Blasberg, Animoto’s senior marketing director, said the company will “wax philosophical from time to time” about why video is so powerful and why it has “almost always been the most effective medium online.” Their conclusion? “A lot of what it comes down to is [video has always been] really hard to fake. And it’s this multimedia medium that is often very engaging, very emotionally compelling. And because [AI-generated content] is kind of a final frontier in a lot of ways, we have, up until recently, had the highest degree of confidence that it was authentic.” Now, a lot has changed. And people, as Blasberg put it, are “curious” about AI’s tells and are on the lookout for them.

The top quality people say they want from brand videos, Animoto’s report finds, is that they feel “personal and authentic.” Killcoyne said marketers should first ask themselves, “Why am I making this video?” and move on from there to make sure the output feels created, not generated. Nearly 68% say featuring real people helps. The audience, basically, is asking for proof-of-life. Then, the audience adds another constraint that turns this into a production headache. Sixty-one percent prefer brand videos under a minute, and 83% say brands should post videos at least weekly. The content treadmill wants volume, and the trust treadmill wants humanity — so you can see why teams reach for the AI lever.

“At the end of the day, we might all love the idea of being able to automate the entire project plan away,” Killcoyne said, “but if we just generate the video and post it, we kind of miss the forest for the trees. Yes, we created our video, but we did not form that connection with the audience that we were creating the video for in the first place.”

CEO Beth Forester said the goal in video creation is “to provide AI in the way that it enhances human creativity, not replaces it.” AI can replace “those repetitive tasks to sort of become your assistant,” giving you time “to be creative in the way that humans are creating their own uniqueness.” She also put it plainly: in-house and creator-style content “feels more authentic and real to people.” In the press release, Forester said the data is clear. “Consumers are curious about AI, but confident in humans,” she said. “Generative AI can speed up and scale your video creation, but it’s no replacement for authenticity. If you want your videos to resonate, you’ve got to balance both.”

Animoto had to learn that lesson itself. The company leaned hard into AI video early on, chasing the same promise everyone else did. What the company ran into was the same wall its users did: videos that technically worked, but felt generic, or vaguely off, or too obviously machine-made to trust. The pivot has been toward something narrower and more human: using AI to clear the annoying craft work while pushing personalization back onto the creator. The internal goal, Matern said, is getting a video “90% of the way there” and leaving the last mile to a person, because perhaps the only thing worse than no video is one that looks like it could belong to anyone.

AI can’t do the job that some marketers keep pretending they want it to do — make something original and human with the push of a button — but Animoto says AI can absolutely do the job those marketers actually need done: clearing the bottlenecks so the work gets made. Animoto’s report finds the biggest drag on video creation is simply coming up with ideas, and 63% of marketers say AI helps there.

AI also shows up as a time-saver and a momentum machine; 55% of respondents use it to speed up editing, 54% use it to find relevant content, 53.8% use it to break through creative blocks, and 55.2% use it to write scripts. The roadmap seems to be to invest in video, embrace AI where it makes production less miserable, and keep actual people in the director’s chair.

So yes, AI can help teams ship more video, and consumers still want video more than anything else. But those same consumers are treating human plausibility as the price of entry. With AI, speed is easy. But trust in 2026 is earned in public — one clip at a time.

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