AI can generate content that looks persuasive, empathetic, or authentic. That’s impressive, but in work that depends on human response – marketing, fundraising, teaching, advocacy – the output was never the hard part. The hard part was the human process behind it.
New research by David Girling and Deborah Adesina at University of East Anglia illustrates this nicely. They analysed reactions to charity campaigns that used AI-generated imagery and found something striking:
Once people suspected the image was not real, the conversation often stopped being about the humanitarian issue and became about the technology instead.
As UEA puts it:
‘When AI images are used, the humanitarian cause effectively disappears from the conversation.’
Human connection isn’t just something you produce, it’s something people believe.
And this sort of belief usually depends on evidence that a real human process happened somewhere along the way: someone listened, someone spent time understanding, someone tried to represent a real situation responsibly.
AI can reproduce the surface features of that process very convincingly. But if the audience senses the process itself might be missing, they stop engaging with the story and start interrogating the artefact.
And this is not really a charity-sector problem. It’s a problem for any work that relies on human response – marketing, advocacy, teaching, fundraising, community work… in fact, pretty much anything that involves other people.
The risk isn’t that AI makes content worse, it’s that it encourages us to optimise the appearance of empathy while quietly removing the actual human work that creates it.
And if that happens, audiences don’t necessarily become more persuaded – they just become more sceptical.
So the interesting question is probably not: ‘Can AI generate empathy?’
But rather: ‘Which parts of empathy are the work itself, and therefore can’t be shortcut?’
Where does taking the human work out and replacing it with AI start to undermine the thing we were trying to achieve in the first place?
You can read more about this new research on UAE’s website.
