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Marcus Johnson (00:05):

Hey, gang. It's Monday, September 8th. Max and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast. I'm Marcus, and joining me for today's conversation, we have senior analyst covering everything digital advertising and media, living that Philly life, it's Max Willens.

Max Willens (00:22):

Yo.

Marcus Johnson (00:23):

Hello there. Today's fact, what is the longest continuous railway line on earth? Any guesses?

Max Willens (00:39):

I'd guess the country, but I don't think I could name it.

Marcus Johnson (00:39):

Go on.

Max Willens (00:44):

Is it in Russia?

Marcus Johnson (00:44):

It is. The Trans-Siberian Railway stretching from-

Max Willens (00:47):

So that is actually a thing, it's not just the name of that group?

Marcus Johnson (00:52):

It is a thing. Stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok, it runs roughly 6,000 miles, or 10,000 kilometers. That's like going across America and then back again. It's that long.

(01:09):

As the train travels east across Russia, it crosses eight times zones, nearly 500 bridges. It goes through 15 tunnels. I thought it would go through more, to be honest, but still, they might be long tunnels. Traverses 16 major rivers, goes through 87 major cities, three countries, and two continents. The whole Trans-Siberian Railway trip takes a week.

(01:37):

Max, would this be one of the best experiences ever or the absolute worst because you're stuck on a train for a week?

Max Willens (01:43):

It depends on if my kids are there or not, and I will not say how that influences my answer. I think that's-

Marcus Johnson (01:43):

Sorry, Max's wife.

Max Willens (01:53):

I think that's super cool.

Marcus Johnson (01:53):

She'd probably be like, "Well..."

Max Willens (01:55):

I actually think that sounds super cool. I have to imagine it's pretty stylish, at least at the right ticket tier. And I have no idea what the view would be like. Is it just like going through Nebraska for a week or is there... You know?

Marcus Johnson (02:16):

Nebraska? Shots fired, but true. Good question. If it's just picturesque, serene then, like you're going through Italy, fine. But if it's pretty barren, that's a tough trip. But once you're committed, you really have no choice. So by day two, you're on it.

Max Willens (02:35):

That's Russian life in a nutshell, right there. You're locked in, suck it up.

Marcus Johnson (02:41):

I'm sure it's wonderful and I'm sure the train is amazing as well. But anyway, today's real topic, genAI and media.

(02:56):

All right, let's dive straight in. Max, you've been doing some homework on this. So my first question to you is how do Americans view genAI-made media? And we're talking they could have made 20% of it, all of it. What does actually genAI-made media mean to you, first?

Max Willens (03:14):

Well, it's important to say that my answer is based on questions that don't specify, so it could mean a complete soup-to-nuts Midjourney-generated image. It could mean something that's been tuned up with AI. They don't get into it, but the answer is not favorably.

(03:37):

Broadly speaking, Americans are really pretty nervous about the overall effects that AI is going to have on society as a whole, and we'll get into this a little bit later, but of all the different facets of public life, media is one of the areas where they are most pessimistic. They are most, most nervous about what AI might do to it, and consequently, people really do take a pretty dim view of it.

(04:11):

Ipsos has done this really interesting work of basically keeping tabs on how Americans think about AI in different contexts, and they found that Americans are much more likely to choose descriptors like "fake" or "not real art" than they are to choose descriptors like "innovative" or "groundbreaking," and that this trend has gotten more pronounced over the last two years.

(04:34):

So they asked a panel of Americans this question in 2023, and then they asked it again in 2025, and they found that the share of people who used negative or disdainful descriptors had risen in almost every single instance, and the incidence of people using positive or admiring descriptors had fallen basically uniformly. And so I think-

Marcus Johnson (04:59):

And "fake" had the biggest leap.

Max Willens (05:01):

That's right.

Marcus Johnson (05:01):

"Innovative" and "fascinating" saw the biggest declines.

Max Willens (05:04):

That's right. And it's not hard to understand why, right?

Marcus Johnson (05:08):

Yes.

Max Willens (05:08):

I mean, I don't want to step on stuff I'll say later, but I think that media, people instinctively understand media as a human creative endeavor and I think people prize it on some level for that quality, and so anything that dilutes or contaminates that is something that people are always going to be a little bit hostile to.

(05:34):

And so I think that... And we've seen this for years and years. I mean, people talked when the phonograph was invented, people were talking about it as something that was fundamentally destroying American's relationship to music because it basically destroyed or obviated the need to go and listen to people perform music in real time in person. And so the hostility toward this technology is, in that sense, really not very surprising at all.

Marcus Johnson (06:02):

Yeah. I had a few takeaways. One was that of all the words that went up or down, people used more or less or felt more strongly towards or less strongly towards based on genAI-made media, "creative" was the only positive word that didn't lose ground.

Max Willens (06:19):

That's right.

Marcus Johnson (06:20):

It stayed exactly where it was. I also thought it was interesting that people, it's not that interesting, but it's surprising given how many people don't do it, people just want to know you're using it.

Max Willens (06:33):

That's right.

Marcus Johnson (06:33):

If they find out later, they feel duped and they're kind of mad at you. But YouGov saying, "Eight in 10 Americans think it's important to explicitly state when genAI has been used." So that will help.

Max Willens (06:46):

Yeah. That's a really important point. I feel like a lot of people are much more tolerant of this if you're aboveboard about it. And I think that that's especially important too in an era where I feel like anytime I go onto a social media platform or engage with a web page where there's an ability to respond to the content on a page, if there's AI content on there that hasn't been disclosed, there's always a comment being like, "Great job, ChatGPT" or something like that. People's AI detectors have gotten, I'd say, pretty sharp pretty fast, which is really fascinating when you think about it.

Marcus Johnson (07:31):

Yeah. Yeah, people don't love plagiarism, but they're fine if you cite your source and you say, "This quote came from this person," so it's that level of transparency.

(07:40):

I thought that it was also interesting, YouGov showing that most Americans are uncomfortable with genAI being used across all news formats as well, whether it's image, video, written articles, audio, social media posts. It's almost two-to-one, nearly three-to-one people saying that they're uncomfortable versus comfortable across all the different news media types.

(08:02):

In your research, you note that the majority, 51% of US adults, are more concerned than excited, which has just got 11%, about the increased use of genAI. YouGov found a similar disparity, but that's amongst the general public. The AI experts are the polar opposite, 47% excited, maybe unsurprisingly, 15% concerned according to Pew Research.

(08:26):

Do you expect the concern over AI gap between the general public and AI experts to widen or shrink over the next few years or months?

Max Willens (08:35):

I think that this is really, I love this question, and I think the answer is going to depend on what area of public life we're talking about, right?

Marcus Johnson (08:41):

Yes.

Max Willens (08:42):

When you think about AI and really of any kind of emergent technology, there's lots of evidence that as people use these chatbots more or engage more with LLM output, attitudes tend to soften or at least you start to see gray in things. And so when it comes to using it for things like helping a person shop or producing something that they can send in a note to somebody that they know that well, that's something that people can wrap their arms around and feel comfortable with it, but I could see the gap actually widening on an area like the economy, for example.

(09:21):

We have this really interesting... What I decided to do for this report was I took this data from Pew Research where they asked, again, AI experts and US adults the same question about where they thought AI would have a positive impact, and I charted it in an XY graph.

(09:39):

As you see on the screen, there are areas of something like consensus. I mean, it's important to underline that fewer than half of US adults are optimistic about any positive impact in any area of public life, but the area where things there's closest reach to a consensus is medical care. And that makes sense, right?

Marcus Johnson (10:04):

Yes.

Max Willens (10:04):

There's been lots and lots of headlines about how ChatGPT does better on med school exams than people do, lots of evidence that AI is actually really good for doing biomedical research, things like that. But you think about something like the economy, this is the second-highest scoring thing among the AI experts, and you can imagine this person in your head already, like some Bay Area guy who says, "Don't worry. Pretty soon we're going to have the UBI and AI is going to do all of the work for us and we're just going to get to work on art." And then you talk to-

Marcus Johnson (10:41):

Universal basic income, yep.

Max Willens (10:42):

Exactly. And then you talk to somebody who is like, "Uh-huh. My cousin's a copywriter and he's scared out of his ever-loving mind about this."

(10:50):

And it reminds me a lot about this broader dynamic that's emerged in public discourse over the last several years where throughout the Biden administration's presidency, there was this constant disconnect where the headlines were, "The Biden economy is great, Bidenomics is awesome, everyone is..." And then when you look at the exit polls, when Trump wound up winning, people said, "I need the prices to come down, okay? I don't care what the stock market's doing. Eggs cost $12 and I'm tired of paying $12 for eggs."

(11:24):

And I feel like AI is a perfect touch point where that same kind of disparity could emerge where you've got maybe the C-suite saying, "AI is fantastic, this is great for productivity," and then you have maybe more working rank-and-file people going, "this is making my life a nightmare," and potential real points of tension sharpening on a disparity like that.

Marcus Johnson (11:53):

Yeah. I didn't know you were going to mention this, but it's rather coincidental, but fits really well with the chart I found, which is from Google and Ipsos, and it was asking folks in America, "What are you excited about or concerned about with regards to potential uses of genAI across a bunch of different fields?" And the big takeaway here to what you're saying is it depends. It depends on what area we're talking about injecting genAI into, and you mentioned the two which I pulled out here: medication discovery and development, good, top of the list in terms of people being excited about them; least excited, stock trading and conversational agents. So yeah, this just supporting that exact point.

(12:39):

What you're talking about there as well is a bit of a paradox is that people, how you feel about the stock market and how you feel about the price of eggs, they're indicators for how you should feel, but you can be at complete extreme ends of the spectrum on both.

(13:03):

And I want to talk about another paradox here because it seems quite similar to, and Stuart, who runs the team, he sent me an article about how with social media and news, people don't trust it, but people still read it. Because I found some other research from YouGov, they found two-thirds of Americans trust news content generated by AI less than news content created by humans. So trust still an issue. However, adoption continues to climb. According to our forecasting gang, you note in the piece that 39% of American internet users are using generative AI today, close to half of the population by 2029, so it's going up and up and up.

(13:49):

So what's your biggest takeaway regarding this AI usage paradox? Basically, a fair amount of folks don't trust the information but continue to use these models.

Max Willens (13:58):

I think it just is emblematic of the progress that we've made as digital media consumers. I found something just that speaks to this most recently in, I think it was maybe January. Vox Media published a survey that found that 42% of respondents said that they thought that search engines were in general were just getting less useful, but that doesn't mean that people stopped using search engines.

(14:22):

And I think that the same is true for generative AI where people, even the most under-informed person is broadly aware of the idea that these things make stuff up. It's not actually going to be correct a hundred percent of the time, but if you're trying to get your arms around something that's complicated and you don't want to spend 35 minutes researching it and one five-minute conversation with a chatbot will get you 60% of the way to the correct answer that you're looking for, that's enough reason to pop it open and query it on a regular basis.

Marcus Johnson (15:06):

I want to go back to two things that we've been talking about. One was go back to the concern of AI gap. That research we just cited that basically showing that most, when you look at the general population, most people are concerned, less people excited. If you look at the experts, it's flipped. However, interestingly, identical shares of both groups, general public and AI experts, say that they are equally concerned and excited, 38%, which is big, big chunk.

(15:36):

So there are people who are, "I'm definitely excited, I'm definitely concerned," and it tips based on which group you're looking at, but there is this group in the middle who are equally both and it's the same, exactly the same share for both groups. I thought that was quite interesting.

Max Willens (15:49):

I had to give an internal presentation earlier this year and about AI and shopping, and one thing that was just so astonishing to me as I was preparing it was I got a bunch of data that reflected surveys and data gathered from various sources in January and that told one story, and then I gathered data again that spoke to a broadly similar set of issues or topics, and the numbers on almost every area moved a lot, sometimes even flip-flopping going from, "I don't trust AI to help me do this at all," to, "I would rather use AI to do this than almost anything else." So it is important to remember that there's an immense amount of fluidity in play here, so that's very important to keep in mind.

Marcus Johnson (16:44):

Yeah,. The pub date on research has always mattered. It matters more today than it ever has-

Max Willens (16:49):

Absolutely.

Marcus Johnson (16:50):

... because of that.

(16:51):

I want to circle back to something else, which was the chart that you threw up on the screen there, pointing out that Pew Research study finding US adults are pessimistic about AI's effects on both the news and entertainment side of media. Is there an area of news or media where you can see folks being more optimistic about AI's effects?

Max Willens (17:10):

So, no.

Marcus Johnson (17:13):

No? Okay. Maybe not.

Max Willens (17:14):

Well, let me... Because this was a question that I probably sat with longer than any of the questions you sent me as part of the prep, and I say no because I thought of something that I actually think would be immensely valuable and would be an immense source of optimism, but it will never, ever get deployed, and so that's why I say no.

Marcus Johnson (17:36):

Okay. What do we have? Hypothetical.

Max Willens (17:37):

Okay. Hypothetical, I think that AI would actually be an immensely valuable assistant in terms of turning down the temperature of our public discourse on social media.

(17:50):

There was a brief period before Elon Musk bought Twitter where, I guess X when it was still Twitter, when Jack Dorsey's people were experimenting with a feature on Twitter that basically if you were posting a link to a story that had been debunked or that was from a publisher that had a long history of publishing misinformation, Twitter would basically, you would hit post, then it would go, "Hang on a second. Just so you know, a lot of people on our platform have flagged that this is fake or this is not true. Are you sure you still want to post it?"

Marcus Johnson (18:28):

Yes, that "Are you sure?" question. Yep.

Max Willens (18:30):

That's exactly right. And I feel like an AI-powered version of that would actually be an immensely powerful and persuasive tool for modulating the conversation and speech that goes on in settings like this. But again, that's exactly the kind of thing that will tamp down on engagement if it maybe makes people leave the site. And so no product manager at any social network is going to implement this and keep their jobs because it does the exact opposite of what those platforms want its users to be doing.

Marcus Johnson (19:06):

Yeah, they won't, but it's a brilliant answer.

(19:10):

Final question here, let's talk about the advertisers for a minute. You write in the piece, "Advertising seems to be regarded differently from editorial or artistic content," which we've been talking about. "Whilst consumers are growing increasingly hostile to AI-generated or enhanced content, that negativity does not seem to apply to ads."

(19:31):

That bit surprised me, that the negativity does not seem to apply to ads, because I started thinking about the AI-infused ads and the backlash they've received. Some of the recent ones, the Coca-Cola 2024 holiday ad, the Toys "R" Us tribute ads to the brand's founder, and the mascot fashion brand Mango using AI-generated models in its campaigns, which prompted accusations of false advertising, job displacement, things like that.

(19:54):

What did you mean by that?

Max Willens (19:59):

We spoke earlier about the test data, which surprised me. This was, to me, the biggest surprise of all the numbers that I dug up.

Marcus Johnson (20:08):

Oh, okay.

Max Willens (20:09):

But I think people have decided that because even though advertising does contain storytelling and it does contain human emotions and it is communicating, it's also not purely those things, right? It's designed to get you to buy stuff. And so it's, I think, maybe embedded in it a little bit is user self-satisfaction and being able to identify and understand the source of the ad that they're looking at, but I'm excited to see how that number evolves over the next couple of years.

Marcus Johnson (20:41):

Yeah. And to be fair, I've just pulled out a handful of examples, but there are a lot of ads that use AI to varying degrees. Some not at all, some 1%, 50%. These seem to be almost 100%, and I think maybe that's what, maybe there's... I'm curious, it circles back to our earlier question, what do people consider AI-made or genAI-made ads or content? What's the threshold? Is it over 50%? Is it 80-plus? And so maybe if it's 100%, people have a problem, if it's 20 and you were told about it, then it's fine.

Max Willens (21:18):

That's right. I will also say too, I mean, it's important to underline that even though the number that say they like it more is a lot higher than either of us were expecting, we're still talking about 44% of people saying they like it more. So if you're being really cold-blooded, we're still talking about a majority not saying or not selecting the "I like it more" choice.

Marcus Johnson (21:48):

Yeah, that's a good point.

Max Willens (21:50):

But the fact that it's even that high still kind of shocks me.

Marcus Johnson (21:53):

Yeah, that's true. Same.

(21:55):

Well, Max's full report is called How Consumers Perceive GenAI in Media. Pro+ subscribers, you know what to do. Link in the show notes if you need it immediately.

(22:05):

That's all we've got time for today's episode. Thank you so much, Max, for hanging out with me today, fella.

Max Willens (22:08):

Always a pleasure, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (22:09):

Yes, the pleasure's all mine. Thanks to the whole editing crew and to everyone for listening into Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast.

(22:14):

Forget subscribing and following. Just make sure that you come say hi to me tomorrow if you are coming to our Future of Digital event at City Winery, Pier 57 in Manhattan. If you're not going, I hope to hang out with you on Friday's show where me and Danny will be speaking all about Spotify and the digital audio world.

Max Willens (22:32):

I'll be listening.