Human-AI Co-Creativity in Advertising: Authorship, Authenticity, and Creative Legitimacy in the Age of Generative Media

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence has moved advertising from largely invisible automation to a regime in which machine systems increasingly participate in the visible composition of persuasive messages. This article offers an interdisciplinary review of that shift by synthesizing verified scholarship, recent 2024-2026 studies, and documented campaign examples from the AI advertising literature. Rather than treating AI mainly as a managerial tool for efficiency or optimization, the article argues that AI-generated advertising should also be understood as a cultural and aesthetic problem. The central claim is that audience response depends not only on whether machine systems are used, but on how their participation is framed, disclosed, and symbolically integrated into the communicative act. Drawing on research on disclosure, trust, perceived humanness, appeal structure, personalization, and category context, the article advances the concept of creative legitimacy to explain why some forms of human-AI collaboration are culturally acceptable while others appear hollow, impersonal, or strategically suspect. Creative legitimacy is not treated here as a synonym for source credibility or authenticity. It refers instead to a higher-order judgment about whether the distribution of human and machine agency fits the symbolic demands of the brand, the category, and the persuasive situation. The review shows that disclosure works as a cultural cue, creative role framing redistributes perceived authorship, humanness functions as a judgment about expressive fit rather than simple realism, and category expectations strongly shape tolerance for machine-made creativity. High-trust domains such as prosocial and political persuasion are especially fragile because AI use can weaken sincerity, accountability, or truthfulness even when technical quality is high. By repositioning AI advertising as a problem of authorship, authenticity, and symbolic value, the article offers a framework suited to literary, cultural, and artistic studies while remaining grounded in the advertising literature.