When The Brand Speaks Without Permission: Navigating Brand Authenticity & Public Discourse in the Era of Autonomous AI Agents

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study is to investigate how autonomous AI communication affects consumers' ability to evaluate brand authenticity in public discourse. The study argues that existing brand authenticity frameworks rest on an unexamined premise, termed here the Supervised AI Communication Assumption, that brand-relevant AI communication is always authorised by a human principal, produced under human oversight, and attributable to an accountable human agent. As autonomous AI agents increasingly participate in brand-relevant communication without human authorisation or oversight, this study investigates what happens to consumer authenticity evaluation when that assumption no longer holds. This study was conducted using a multi-method qualitative research design, combining documentary case study analysis with vignette-based elicitation interviews. Two revelatory real-world cases were analysed in depth. Drawing on the findings of this documentary analysis, two fictional vignette scenarios were constructed using AI assistance to translate both failure modes into a brand-relevant context. These vignettes were presented to 12 purposively sampled participants, comprising 7 consumers and 5 brand management practitioners, in semi-structured elicitation interviews. Interviews were audio-recorded, and data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and guided throughout by Morhart et al.'s (2015) four-dimensional brand authenticity framework. The documentary analysis reveals that both cases implicate brand credibility and integrity the most. The interview findings identify brand accountability and transparency as the two primary criteria through which consumers evaluate brand authenticity in these scenarios, directly implicating integrity and credibility. The findings demonstrate that brands cannot disclaim AI-generated communications without incurring both legal and authenticity-related accountability failures. It also notes that transparency about AI involvement must be treated as a brand authenticity imperative rather than a discretionary disclosure, and that the governance of AI communication systems should be understood as a brand responsibility rather than solely a technical one. Previous research on AI in marketing communication has focused predominantly on supervised, brand-deployed AI tools, such as generative content systems, and has assumed throughout that a human principal authorises and oversees the AI's communicative output. This study examines brand authenticity in the context of autonomous AI agents acting without such authorisation or oversight, and attempts to ground that investigation in two documented, real-world incidents.