Impact of AI-Generated Social Media Content on Brand Authenticity: The Mediating Role of Consumer Engagement

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly reshaped contemporary marketing practice, particularly in the domain of digital and social media communication. AI-enabled systems are now capable of autonomously generating marketing content, including captions, visuals, and personalized messages, allowing firms to scale communication efforts while enhancing relevance and efficiency (Davenport, Guha, Grewal, & Bressgott, 2020). As social media platforms continue to function as primary interfaces between brands and consumers, AI-generated content has become an increasingly central element of digital marketing strategies. Prior research on AI in marketing has predominantly focused on analytics, automation, and service efficiency, emphasizing firm-level performance outcomes such as productivity, targeting accuracy, and cost reduction (Huang & Rust, 2021). While these studies provide valuable insights into the operational benefits of AI, they offer limited understanding of consumer-level responses to AI-generated brand communication. In particular, there is a growing need to examine how consumers perceive and react to AI-generated content in interactive environments such as social media, where relational and symbolic brand meanings are continuously constructed. One brand-related outcome that warrants closer attention in this context is brand authenticity. Brand authenticity reflects consumers’ perceptions of a brand as genuine, sincere, and true to its values, and it has been shown to play a critical role in shaping trust, emotional attachment, and long-term brand equity (Beverland, Wilner, & Micheli, 2019). However, the increasing use of algorithmically generated content introduces new tensions for authenticity perceptions. While AI-generated content may be informative, creative, and personalized, consumers may also perceive such communication as impersonal or artificially constructed, potentially undermining authenticity in brand–consumer relationships.