The Tragedy of the Commons in AI Marketing: Why AI Ads Are Starting to Look the Same
While I was browsing Facebook ads to get a feel for what the current ad market looks like, the first ad I saw had this pop to it that really made it stand out. From experience, it was clear that this pop effect came from having AI create their ads. But the ad after that also had this pop, and so did the one after that. The more I kept scrolling, the more it started to feel like nine out of ten ads had this pop, and all of a sudden the ads that lacked pop were the ones I remembered. This led me to formulate my hypothesis: The more businesses rely on AI to cut marketing costs, the less their content stands out, and the better their audiences get at recognizing it.
What Is the Tragedy of the Commons in AI Marketing?
This effect can be explained by a principle called the Tragedy of the Commons. This principle states that the more a shared resource is used by individuals, the less effective it stands to be as time passes. It was originally popularized by Garrett Hardin, when he analyzed how a grazing commons for shepherds lost its effectiveness the more cows were added to the commons. Each additional cow helped the individual shepherd who added it, but it took away from all the other shepherds who share the commons. The same pattern can be seen with the use of AI in the marketing field, with the commons being the conversion rate for businesses who regularly use AI for digital marketing. To put it more simply: because of AI there is less friction around creating digital media to promote a business, and this higher influx can lower conversion rates by decreasing customer trust, as well as brand visibility. This creates a slippery slope because in response many businesses choose to generate more media to try to increase their personal conversion rates, but in reality this only accelerates the depletion of conversion rates across the whole industry.
Why Small Businesses Turn to AI for Marketing
It's hard to blame a business for following this path. Logically, it makes the most sense; AI media can be produced in bulk in almost no time and at a fraction of the cost of a professional. Even on a scientific level, AI has been observed to increase the creative output of its average user. In an experiment by Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser, published in Science Advances in 2024, writers were asked to create short stories, and some of them were given story ideas from AI to work with. The stories written with AI’s help were rated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable than the ones written without it. The biggest boost went to the writers who were the least creative on their own. This relationship can also be observed with sole-proprietorship entrepreneurs when they enlist the aid of AI to create their media. Many new business owners don't have the spare capital to hire professionals and they often lack the skill to make the media themselves, so outsourcing to AI is their best bet. Without a deeper glance, it really does seem like there are no drawbacks to following this path.
How AI Marketing Drains the Commons
Does AI-Generated Marketing Hurt Customer Trust?
In one 2025 study, people were shown ads with AI-generated images and were told why the company used AI. When the reason was to save money, their trust in the brand and their willingness to buy dropped significantly. Outside the lab, people feel the same way: in a survey by marketing agency Tinuiti, 40% of Gen Z and 42% of baby boomers said brands that use AI in their ads come across as scams. That’s not a judgment on one bad ad. It’s a judgment on every brand that looks like it took the shortcut.
Can People Tell When Content Is Made With AI?
A 2025 study by Jenna Russell, Marzena Karpinska, and Mohit Iyyer had people read 300 articles and decide which ones were written by a human and which were written by AI. The people who used AI for their own writing turned out to be incredibly good at telling real from fake, even without any training. When five of them voted together, they got 299 out of 300 articles right, beating most AI detection software, even when the AI text had been reworded to sound more human. They picked up on typical AI literary trends, but also on subtler signals like how formal or original the writing felt. It is important to note here that exposure to AI doesn't train someone to spot it, but actually using AI in your daily life does.
How Many People Can Spot AI Content?
According to Pew Research, the share of American adults using ChatGPT and similar chatbots jumped from 18% in 2023 to 44% in 2026, and among adults under 30, it’s now 61%. As AI continues to grow in popularity, especially in the corporate world, the audience that remains unable to detect AI in digital advertising will continue to shrink. So as of today, a fair chunk of your audience might not be able to detect the use of AI in media, but as the days pass your conversions are slowly being chipped away.
What If Customers Don’t Notice the AI?
Unfortunately, you’re still not in the clear, because even AI content that passes as human tends to look like everyone else’s. Researchers at Wharton re-examined a study that claimed that the use of ChatGPT improved creativity, but they found a catch. When participants were asked to invent a toy using a brick and a fan, 94% of the ChatGPT-assisted ideas overlapped with each other, and nine people independently came up with the exact same name: “Build-a-Breeze Castle.” AI was able to help the participants make their ideas more creative, but when the ideas were lined up, it was clear that the one crucial thing they lacked was diversity. This is exactly what I saw with the ads that were up on Facebook. Even though each ad looked appealing and it seemed to have a few hours of digital work poured into it, that appeal quickly drained as I scrolled through the feed, because they all had that same pop and none of them were able to stand out from each other.
How AI Content Hurts Marketing Platforms
When a majority of businesses use AI to generate their media, not only do they sacrifice their own reputation but they also sacrifice the reputation of the platform they are advertising on. For example, if a Facebook group exists for small businesses to promote themselves, and most of the small businesses use AI-generated media, consumers are less likely to trust the business itself and they are less likely to continue to visit the Facebook group if all the media is oversaturated with AI.
Can the Commons Be Saved?
Garrett Hardin, the man who originally popularized the Tragedy of the Commons, believed that shared resources are bound to be exploited, until the government steps in or they get privatized. This view was widely held until Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, released her book Governing the Commons in 1990. She contradicted Hardin by stating that communities don't need to rely on government or privatization, as long as they are able to build and maintain conditions that foster self-governance. By Ostrom’s principles, in the world of AI-generated marketing, creating a digital environment with regulations on who can post, what can be posted, and having a system of graduated sanctions, can improve conversions and signal trust to consumers.
What This Looks Like in Online Communities
Actions like implementing bot/spam protection, and hiring moderators who are experienced with AI media can help reverse the negative effects. Based on Russell et al., writers who use AI themselves are good at spotting it, so AI-proficient moderators would likely be effective at filtering AI-generated content. Beyond just having a regulator, platforms should also aim to follow graduated sanctions. When researchers applied Ostrom’s ideas to 80,000 online communities, they found that leaning towards soft punishments, like reminders, and warnings, opposed to direct bans for first time violators, was highly favoured by the communities. This suggests that successful online communities tend to lean on soft regulations, which fits Ostrom's graduated approach.
What Small Businesses Can Do
Should Small Businesses Still Use AI for Marketing?
Short answer: yes. AI tools are powerful and they are meant to be used, but their use should be deliberate and thought out. The goal of advertisement is to allow a business to stand out, and currently in the advertising market, because of the overuse of AI media, almost nothing stands out.
DIY, AI-Assisted, or Professional: Three Ways to Create Content
Many small businesses do not actually need a whole marketing team behind them and a majority of them would be fine commissioning a freelancer when need be. I believe that there are three main tiers to developing self-promotional content that would work in this current market:
1. Self-made content: without the help of AI or external resources
2. Fusion content: self-made with the assistance of AI and/or professional help
3. Professionally sourced content: handing over the reins to a professional in the field, and letting them make all the decisions.
The question remains: which should you pick? A good place to start is with what your customers will actually accept. According to a Gallup poll, 75% of Americans are fine with businesses using AI to brainstorm or draft ads, as long as it’s disclosed, and 53% are fine with AI creating the final text, images, or video. But they’re far less accepting when AI is used to create people or voices. That gives us a pretty clear line. Customers are generally fine with AI helping behind the scenes, but less so when it’s front and center.
My Recommendation for Small Businesses
Before I give my pick, a quick disclosure: I’m a marketer myself, so take my recommendation with that in mind. I’ve tried to lay out the options fairly, and hiring someone isn’t the only way to get this right. For the average small business, I recommend Fusion content with a freelancer. This way, AI tools can be used to mitigate costs, and a professional can be used to offer actual insight, or handle the parts customers actually see and remember, like your visuals and the headlines that are meant to grab attention. Following this method will help you optimize the time you invest into your media and is going to help it bring in the conversions you’re after.
Was I Right?
Looking back at the Facebook feed that sparked my curiosity in this topic, and looking at the research I've dug into while writing this, it seems that my hypothesis has mostly held up. The people best at spotting AI are the ones who use it, and that group is growing every year. And even when AI content slips by unnoticed, it tends to blend in with everything else, reducing brand visibility. That said, this is a pattern the evidence points to, not a settled law. The research is still young, the world of AI is still developing, and the market keeps changing. In the world of AI marketing, customer trust is at risk, but it’s not gone yet. Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons still stands. Ostrom’s principles of self-governance seem to be a likely path that will win back customer trust, and each business still has the power to reel it back in.
What Does This Mean for the Future of Digital Marketing?
That depends on how fast businesses catch on to the fact that the use of AI in digital marketing is following the trend of the Tragedy of the Commons. How far will customer trust deplete before the public calls for change? If it's caught in time, then this could just be a small hiccup that no one will remember ten years from now. But if the neglect persists, then it might just call for a revamping of the entire industry.