The risk/reward of using GenAI

Hi all, Gabriella here for Edition 108!

This week, we’re delving into what Luminate’s Generative AI in Music, Film and TV report says about younger audiences’ attitudes towards GenAI, and what that means for all of you integrating it in your content pipelines.

Plus Speed Reads of:

Over Christmas, I put on a jazz album I hadn't heard before. It was exactly what I wanted - no lyrics, classic, secular Christmas songs. And then, about halfway through, a thought crept in that I couldn't shake: what if this is AI?

I spent the next ten minutes on my phone trying to find out. When I confirmed it was real musicians (the New York Lounge Quartett, for those wondering), I felt something I didn't expect: relief. Not satisfaction that the music was good. Relief that it was real.

That feeling is what the Luminate Intelligence report on Generative AI in Music, Film & TV in 2026 captures. What it says about the direction of fan reaction to generative AI is important for every sports, entertainment, and gaming brand incorporating this tech into their content pipelines.

Between May and November 2025, consumer interest in AI-written film and TV dropped from net -9% to net -20%. The shift was driven by Gen Alpha and Gen Z moving fastest in the negative direction, across every film and TV production use case that Luminate measured.

These are the fans many of you are spending the most effort trying to reach - building Roblox experiences, running Discord servers for. As we covered in Edition #94 the golden age for discovery is around 8 years old. If you get someone when they're young, you're able to build a relationship that can span decades and generations. But that relationship only grows if the emotional connection is real to begin with.

The Luminate data suggests that those young audiences are becoming more opposed to AI in the content they love, and doing so decisively. The report specifically notes that the share of indifferent respondents held steady, meaning net declines came from people shifting from open to firmly against.

The takeaway: Be savvy about where you deploy GenAI. The more AI saturates feeds and platforms, the more discriminating audiences get about when they feel something genuine. A brand that capitalised on their genuine craftsmanship is Aardman, whose Behind the Craft series walks fans through exactly how each project is made: the animatics, the clay, the fingerprints literally pressed into the puppets.

Music is a great test-case industry for other brands. AI-generated recording artists are on streaming platforms already, accumulating real streams, appearing on Billboard charts, and collecting royalties. Unsurprisingly, Suno AI is the number one music app in the App Store.

But most listeners have no idea they’re not listening to human musicians. Disclosure isn't required on most music platforms, so the provenance of many of these acts remains anonymous.

Some platforms, like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, are now tagging AI-generated content, which lessens the risk of breaking your audience’s trust. However, these labels don’t say where or how GenAI was used, and with AI tools getting more sophisticated, I think transparent disclosure can be the key between keeping a fan engaged and losing them.

And the data from the report backs it up - when fans discover after the fact that something was AI-generated, sentiment shifts from neutral to decisively negative. This is almost entirely because they felt deceived, and has nothing to do with the quality of the music.

That's the real threat to fan-led brands in this environment. You don’t have to disclose where AI was used in your content, but if you’re discovered to be hiding it, you degrade your audience's trust. 

This creates both a risk and an opportunity. 

Audiences went from assuming everything is human-made to assuming everything has been manipulated by AI, meaning it’s on brands to prove where their human touch is and not take for granted that an audience believes them.

But that doesn’t mean all use of generative AI is perceived as negative, and the data draws that distinction clearly.

Consumer sentiment is net positive toward AI use for visual effects, sound effects, animation and dubbing - which the likes of ILM have pioneered for many years (plug: find out more from ILM’s Elizabeth Walker’s episode of The Speakeasy).

On the flip-side, it turns net negative for scripts, synthetic actors, and digital replicas of real people. The steepest drops in comfort for Gen Alpha and Gen Z (down 21 points in six months) came specifically around AI-generated performances in the style of human artists.

My interpretation is that fans aren’t rejecting the technology itself; they’re rejecting the idea that the soul of a story can be automated.

Remember: AI in the pipeline is broadly acceptable to audiences. AI as the author of the story they love is not. Draw that line clearly before you promote anything fan-facing.

I think the Luminate report is reiterating something important, and something we bang on about quite a lot: the emotional relationship fans have with IP is the thing that makes it valuable. If you erode that, there’s a ‘trust penalty’ of lower engagement, weaker brand evaluations and even public backlash.

For fan-led organisations, losing trust is a direct threat to the connection that not only makes your IP valuable but also drives the fan along their journey from discovery to purchase, making it part of their identity and an advocate for it.

The brands navigating this well in 2026 are separating two things:

1. AI as infrastructure (smarter distribution, personalised discovery, production efficiency), all of which fans broadly accept.

and

2. AI as a creative voice (where audiences' tolerance is shrinking fastest, especially among the youngest fans you most need to build with), i.e. Coca-Cola's AI-generated 2024 holiday ad, which still drew public criticism despite being impressive.

We’ve talked before about how to create reentry touchpoints for lapsed audiences. But if you lose a fan over authenticity, that’s much harder ground to recover.

As I talked about in the last newsletter, we all know generative AI tech is here to stay, and it’s up to brands to figure out how best to use it.

In my opinion, there’s a simple question to always ask yourself: does this tool deepen my relationship with the fan/enhance their experience, or does it just cost less? In short, it’s efficiency vs enhancement.

If you can get that distinction right from the start, you’ll be able to maintain that invaluable emotional connection to your fans without sacrificing innovation.

Webtoon is integrating Genies' AI avatar technology into its platform, allowing fans to interact with characters from select titles in 3D, chat-based formats.

TL:DR -

Why you should care

Webtoon is explicitly positioning this as creator-first: participation is opt-in, every character experience is built to reflect the original work, and creators work directly with Genies to customise how their characters appear and behave. This is a smart move, and it lessens the risk that the authenticity that made fans care in the first place will erode.

As we’ve discussed above, trust is incredibly important, so building creator approval into the process from the start gets buy-in, and helps Webtoon to continue innovating with the creator on-side whilst they try new things to engage fans.

The collectibles piece is worth watching, too. Webtoon is effectively creating a new engagement pattern: fans interact with characters, unlock items, and access expanded lore. That's a retention and monetisation mechanic, and if it works at scale, it becomes a template for how narrative IP gets extended in the age of interactive media.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!