This study aims to investigate how consumers respond to advertisements generated by artificial intelligence (AI) versus those created by humans and explore the psychological mechanisms underlying these responses. Specifically, it examines whether affective involvement mediates the effect of advertising source on consumer attitudes and whether this effect varies by product type (utilitarian vs hedonic).
This study consists of two online experiments. A total of 275 participants were recruited from Prolific. Mediation and moderated mediation analyses were conducted to examine the psychological mechanisms underlying responses to AI-generated versus human-generated advertisements.
The findings show that consumers evaluated AI-generated ads more favorably than human-generated ones, particularly for utilitarian products. Study 1 demonstrated that the advertising source influences attitudes through affective involvement, with consumers experiencing greater emotional engagement with AI-generated ads. Study 2 revealed that the positive influence of AI-generated ads was significant for utilitarian products but not for hedonic ones. These results suggest that affective involvement plays a key role in consumer responses to AI-generated advertising and that product type moderates this relationship, highlighting the importance of context in leveraging AI for marketing effectiveness.
This study addresses inconsistent findings in prior literature by shifting the focus from whether AI-generated advertisements are effective to explaining why and when they influence consumer responses. It introduces affective involvement as a key underlying mechanism and identifies product type as a critical boundary condition, thereby extending persuasion theory and advancing research on AI-generated marketing content.
