Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
23 September 2026
The Essentials
California has adopted a new law requiring explicit disclosure when video or audio advertising uses AI-generated performers to sell a product or service. Until now, advertising has largely tried to make its production invisible: sets, retouching, visual effects and staging disappeared behind the finished message. AI introduces a different issue because it can now generate the face or voice delivering that message. Transparency may therefore become a new part of advertising itself, requiring brands not only to explain what they are selling, but sometimes to reveal how the person apparently selling it was created.
Advertising has always relied on a form of accepted illusion. The kitchen is not really a family kitchen, the car is driving on a road closed for filming, the lighting has been reconstructed, images have been retouched and dialogue repeated until it produces exactly the intended emotion. Audiences know perfectly well that advertising is manufactured, yet part of its effectiveness comes from making that manufacturing disappear for a few seconds.
Artificial intelligence introduces a particular break in this arrangement. It no longer merely changes the setting, the image or the voice. It can now create the person who appears to be speaking. An apparently human character can recommend a product, present an offer or describe an experience without ever having existed.
California has now moved this issue from creative practice into transparency requirements. Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1050 on 16 September, requiring explicit disclosure in video or audio advertising that uses AI-generated performers to sell products or services. The legislation also provides mechanisms to prevent non-compliant advertising from continuing to run.
Behind the protection of performers and the information given to consumers lies a much broader question for brands: what happens to advertising when part of its production process has to become visible?
Advertising has always transformed reality without having to explain how
Nobody expects a car manufacturer to state that the road shown in its commercial was closed during filming. A perfume campaign does not list the visual effects used to construct its atmosphere. Food photography does not disclose every adjustment required to make a product look more appealing under studio lighting.
None of this production has ever been secret in the strict sense. It simply belongs to the language of advertising. Viewers accept that a commercial message is staged precisely because they understand that they are watching advertising.
AI complicates that contract because it does not only transform what surrounds the message. It can alter, or entirely manufacture, the person who appears to be delivering it. When a synthetic character looks into the camera and explains why they like a product, the question is no longer simply whether the image has been retouched. It becomes whether the person apparently giving the testimonial exists at all.
That difference may appear subtle, but it touches something central to advertising: the transfer of credibility. A face, a voice, a manner or an emotion does not merely make a campaign more attractive. It gives the commercial message a human presence.
When that presence itself is generated, production is no longer only a technical matter. It becomes information that may change the way audiences interpret the message.
Saying that an advertisement uses AI does not automatically make it less effective
The instinctive reaction for some brands may be to see disclosure as a constraint. If audiences immediately know that a performer does not exist, the illusion is broken and the campaign may appear less persuasive.
That assumption relies on the idea that advertising effectiveness always depends on hiding how the message was made. Yet consumers are already accustomed to very different forms of mediation. They understand that an influencer may be paid, a post can be sponsored and a product placement reflects a commercial agreement. Transparency does not necessarily eliminate influence. It allows audiences to understand the context in which the message is being presented.
The same logic is beginning to matter in new advertising environments. As advertising arrives in ChatGPT, the boundary between recommendations, content and sponsored messages also becomes a question of trust. A clearly identified advertisement can still influence a decision, provided users understand what is advice, what is editorial content and what is commercial communication.
Generative AI may follow a similar path. A brand capable of producing an effective campaign around a synthetic character does not necessarily benefit from encouraging viewers to believe that the person is real. It may instead choose to make the artificial nature of the character part of the creative concept.
In some cases, knowing that a character was entirely generated could even become part of the appeal.
The problem begins when production changes what the audience believes it is seeing
Not every use of AI creates the same issue. Modifying a background, producing animation or generating a visual variation does not have the same effect as creating an artificial individual who appears to personally recommend a product.
The difference lies less in the technology itself than in the role the synthetic element plays within the message.
A campaign may use a considerable amount of artificial intelligence while remaining perfectly understandable to its audience. Conversely, a single synthetic voice or face may become problematic if the campaign depends specifically on viewers believing that the person exists and is speaking from genuine experience.
Brands will therefore need to separate two questions that are still too often treated as one: what technology makes possible and what it is reasonable to allow consumers to believe.
That distinction directly concerns the consistency between marketing, communication and brand perception. A campaign can be legally compliant, technically impressive and commercially effective in the short term while still creating discomfort if audiences later discover that what they interpreted as a human presence was entirely synthetic.
The cost of ambiguity can then extend beyond advertising performance. It can become reputational.
Transparency could become part of the creative language itself
Advertising history shows that constraints often develop their own conventions. Sponsored labels, regulatory notices and rules surrounding particular product categories have gradually been incorporated into formats, sometimes to the point where audiences barely notice them.
AI disclosure may evolve differently. It is emerging at a moment when consumers are increasingly trying to understand what is real, edited, generated or automated. The provenance of content is becoming information in its own right.
A brand may therefore choose not to treat disclosure as a small disclaimer added purely to satisfy regulation. It could make it explicit: this character was created with AI, this campaign was built using generative models, this entire visual world is synthetic.
That transparency may even have an unexpected advantage. It places greater responsibility back on creativity. If viewers already know that a character is artificial, the campaign can no longer rely primarily on confusion between what is real and what is generated. It has to remain interesting despite that knowledge, and perhaps because of it.
The issue therefore reaches far beyond California. Local regulation may accelerate the shift, but the underlying question already concerns every brand capable of producing synthetic images, voices or performers.
For two decades, digital advertising has refined its ability to personalise, automate and optimise what consumers see. Artificial intelligence now gives it the ability to manufacture almost everything it shows them.
That additional power may come with a counterpart: having to reveal more about how the image was created.
Advertising will not stop being a form of staging. But in the age of AI, showing part of what happens behind the scenes may become one of the conditions for preserving trust in what happens on screen.
If artificial intelligence is transforming your content, campaigns or brand communications, we can help you structure these new uses without losing the consistency and trust that give the message its value.
Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
23 September 2026
