Science Just Confirmed It: GenAI Ads Outperform Human Creativity (Here’s Why)
by Ellad Kushnir Matarasso
Dec 30, 2025
For years, the marketing world has been locked in a debate: Can Artificial Intelligence truly match the nuance, emotion, and “spark” of human creativity?
At Alison.ai, we’ve always believed that data doesn’t kill creativity, it supercharges it. Now, a groundbreaking new study has provided the empirical evidence to back that up.
A recent research paper from researches at NYU and Emory published on SSRN, titled The Effectiveness of Visual Generative AI in Advertising, reveals a startling truth: GenAI-created ads are not just efficient, they are statistically more effective than ads created solely by human experts.
Here is our take on these findings and what they mean for your creative strategy.
The 19% Advantage
The headline statistic from the study is hard to ignore. In field settings, conducted through Google Display advertising campaignsads created holistically by Generative AI achieved a Click-Through Rate (CTR) increase of up to 19% compared to human benchmarks.
Why the boost? The researchers found that GenAI-generated visuals elicited stronger emotional engagement and higher visual processing fluency. In other words, the AI wasn’t just “guessing”; it was generating imagery that the human brain found easier to process and more emotionally resonant.
This aligns perfectly with what we see daily at Alison.ai. Our Creative Genome technology doesn’t just look at an image; it breaks down thousands of features, from color palettes to character emotions, to understand exactly why a creative performs. When you build from data-backed insights, you aren’t relying on gut instinct; you are engineering resonance.
Creation vs. Modification: Go Big or Go Home
One of the most nuanced findings in the study was the difference between modification and creation.
- GenAI-Modified Ads: Using AI to merely tweak or edit existing human ads showed no significant improvement in performance.
- GenAI-Created Ads: Using AI to generate the ad holistically from scratch drove that massive 19% performance spike.
Alison’s Angle: This is a crucial lesson for marketers. Using AI merely as a “productivity tool” to crop images or change background colors is leaving money on the table. To see a real ROAS lift, you need to let AI drive the ideation and creation process.
This is why we built our Agentic Video Generation engine. Instead of simply iterating on existing assets, our platform uses Creative Genome data to synthesize entirely new video concepts from the ground up. By analyzing billions of data points, from successful pacing to high-converting visual themes, we allow you to generate data-validated video creatives in a single click. The goal is to let the AI build the foundation of your video based on what is scientifically proven to work, ensuring your creative is performance-ready before it even launches.
The “Label” Trap
The study dropped one major caveat: Disclosing that an ad was created by AI reduced its effectiveness by 31.5%.
It seems that while consumers love looking at AI-generated content (often finding it more visually pleasing), they still hold a bias against the idea of it.
The Strategic Takeaway: The quality of the creative should speak for itself. Your audience cares about the story, the emotion, and the visual appeal, not the tool stack you used to build it. Focus on producing high-quality, authentic-feeling creatives. Use AI to optimize the “what” (the visual elements, the trends, the colors), but ensure the “how” remains seamless.
The Future is Data-Driven
This research validates a shift we have championed since day one. The era of guessing what your audience wants is over.
If GenAI can deliver a 19% uplift in CTR by optimizing for visual fluency and emotion, imagine what it can do when paired with your specific campaign data.
It’s time to stop treating AI as a shortcut and start treating it as your new creative partner.
Ready to stop guessing and start generating? Book a Demo with Alison.ai
