Consumers have doubts about products when they’re designed by AI

A new study from Georgia State University and the University of South Florida, both in the US, delivers a warning to companies betting on AI to power their product design: The technology may make products more efficient, but it doesn’t necessarily make consumers believe they’re more sustainable. In fact, it can do the opposite. 

“We looked specifically at product design and how people perceive AI and sustainability, and there was a clear belief among product designers that AI is not going to put the human touch and care behind designing a product like an actual human would,” says Barbara Duffek, an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Georgia State and co-author on the study. 

“After conducting controlled experiments, in-depth interviews with product designers and a live Meta advertising test, the researchers found a consistent and striking pattern: When consumers learn a product was designed by AI rather than by a human, they rate it as less sustainable.

In one experiment, an identical backpack scored 4.27 out of 7 on perceived sustainability when described as human-designed, but only 3.61 when the exact same backpack was labelled ‘AI-designed’. The product never changed. Only the story behind it did. 

For companies pouring resources into AI-driven product development, this creates a paradox. The technology can make a product more sustainable in objective terms. But if the marketing highlights the AI’s role, it may inadvertently undercut consumer trust in exactly the claim the company is trying to make. 

The lack of consumer trust is emotional, not technical 

“As we conducted our interviews to figure out why consumers trust AI-designed products less, it became clear that it’s emotional, not technical. We found that consumers perceive sustainability as inherently about love and care for the environment and society,” explains Duffek. 

Through interviews with senior product design executives, the team identified a concept they call ‘genuine care’ – the sense that real love, intentionality and moral concern went into how a product was made.  

That sentiment turned out to be the whole story. Statistical testing confirmed that perceived ‘genuine care’ is the mechanism connecting AI involvement to lower sustainability ratings. Consumers link sustainability to human values – empathy, responsibility, moral intent – and by default, they don’t extend those same assumptions to a machine, even a highly capable one. Efficiency reads as cold; care reads as sustainable.

The good news for brands is that this perception gap isn’t static. In one of the more actionable findings, the researchers showed that when companies explicitly frame AI as having been ‘guided by genuine care for environmental and societal outcomes’, the sustainability penalty shrinks significantly – though it doesn’t disappear entirely.  

Simply being transparent about using AI, on the other hand, doesn’t help at all. Transparency alone isn’t a substitute for signalling care. Neither does it matter how AI-literate a given consumer is — the bias shows up regardless of familiarity with the technology. 

In other words, the fix isn’t hiding AI’s role or hoping consumers won’t notice. It’s actively communicating the values behind the AI’s design choices, not just its capabilities.

A company that says, “our AI was built to minimise environmental impact” will impact differently than one that simply says, “designed by AI” and leaves consumers to fill in the blanks. Left unfilled, those blanks tend to default to scepticism. 

The research is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. You can find out more about it here.