Consumers rate identical products as less sustainable when told they were designed by AI, according to a new study from Georgia State University's J. Mack Robinson College of Business and the University of South Florida. The finding, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, signals a direct challenge for product teams integrating AI into design workflows while also marketing sustainability credentials.
The research combined controlled experiments, interviews with product design executives, and a live Meta advertising test. The pattern held across every method. In one experiment, an identical backpack scored 4.27 out of 7 on perceived sustainability when described as human-designed, but dropped to 3.61 when labeled "AI-designed." The product never changed. Only the story behind it did.
The "genuine care" gap
"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," said Barbara Duffek, an assistant professor of marketing at Georgia State and co-author of the study.
Interviews with senior design executives revealed a concept the researchers call "genuine care" - the sense that real love, intentionality, and moral concern went into how a product was made. One executive put it bluntly: "Why would AI care if my product's sustainable like a human would? AI doesn't have kids that are going to walk the Earth in 100 years."
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 they don't extend those assumptions to a machine, even a highly capable one. Efficiency reads as cold. Care reads as sustainable.
Marketing framing changes the outcome
In a live A/B test running ads for a reusable cup, framing the product as "AI-designed" cut click-through rates and reduced engagement to a fraction of what the "human-designed" version generated. In a separate experiment offering a free toothbrush with sustainability in mind, more than three-quarters of participants chose the human-designed option - even though both toothbrushes were identical.
For companies investing in AI-driven product development, this creates a paradox. The technology can make a product more sustainable in objective terms - optimizing materials, cutting waste, streamlining manufacturing. But if marketing highlights AI's role, it may undercut consumer trust in the exact claim the company is trying to make.
The perception gap isn't fixed, however. When companies explicitly framed AI as "guided by genuine care for environmental and societal outcomes," the sustainability penalty shrank significantly - though it didn't disappear. Transparency alone doesn't help. Neither does consumer familiarity with AI; the bias appears regardless of how AI-literate a given consumer is.
For product development teams navigating this dynamic, resources on AI for Product Development and an AI Learning Path for Product Managers offer practical grounding in how AI tools fit into design and go-to-market decisions.
Disclosure deadlines are coming
The study lands as regulators move toward requiring companies to disclose AI's role in design. That combination - more AI involvement, more mandated disclosure - means companies won't be able to quietly let AI do the work behind the scenes much longer. They'll have to talk about it. And how they talk about it, the research suggests, will matter as much as what the AI actually accomplishes.
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 minimize environmental impact" will land differently than one that simply says "designed by AI" and leaves consumers to fill in the blanks. Left unfilled, those blanks default to skepticism.
Why this matters for product development professionals
If your team uses AI in design and your brand makes sustainability claims, you now have data showing that how you describe the AI's role directly affects consumer perception. Before launch, align product and marketing on messaging that names the human intent behind AI-driven design choices - who set the goals, what values guided the parameters, and why sustainability was a constraint from the start. Treat that messaging as a product requirement, not an afterthought. The study shows it can recover much of the trust that an "AI-designed" label otherwise forfeits.
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