A new Luminate Intelligence report published Friday (July 24) finds that US consumers are “more wary than willing” to engage with entertainment content created using generative AI, with net sentiment negative across every major media category. The report, titled AI & Media: Audience Attitudes, draws on Luminate’s quarterly US Entertainment 365 consumer survey to measure attitudes across music, film, TV, social media, video games, and news. The headline finding is consistent with what Luminate has been tracking since it first added AI questions to the survey in May 2025: more Americans are uncomfortable with AI-generated content than are comfortable with it, and that gap has been widening.
The generational breakdown is where the report gets genuinely complicated. Consumers aged 55 and older are “the most deeply negative” on AI-assisted content across every media type. The 13 to 17 cohort, by contrast, is the only age group that registers net positive across all formats. What complicates the clean Gen Z-as-AI-enthusiast narrative is the 18 to 24 cohort, which diverges sharply from teenagers: Luminate recorded 58-point gaps between the two groups on AI-scripted movies, AI-scripted TV shows, and AI-generated social media content. Older Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X all cluster near breakeven, neither strongly for nor against. Luminate analyst Audrey Schomer, who authored a related earlier report, attributed some of this shift among older Gen Z to AI fatigue and “more and more concerns about jobs” as the reality of AI’s effect on entry-level employment has become harder to ignore. The report states directly that “it would be a mistake to regard Gen Z as a monolith in its attitudes toward AI content,” adding that “intragenerational faultlines” may matter more than the generational label itself.
Across media types, the findings are broadly similar, with one notable exception at each end. News written with generative AI generated the most opposition of any format tested, a result consistent with the trust dimension that differentiates journalism from other entertainment categories. Video games showed the least opposition, with 40% of respondents reporting they were neither more nor less interested in a game whose characters, environments, or dialogue were made with AI, a higher ambivalence rate than any other format. Music sits in between: Luminate’s 2025 Year-End data showed that around 44% of US respondents would be less interested in music if they knew generative AI had produced it, compared to 24% who would be more interested. The item that made listeners most uncomfortable in that data was “a new original song performed by an AI voice,” with 46% very or somewhat uncomfortable.
The research adds meaningful consumer context to a year in which streaming platforms have been racing to build AI detection and labeling infrastructure precisely because the upload problem has outpaced any individual platform’s ability to manage it manually. Deezer reported earlier this month that fully AI-generated tracks had crossed 50% of its daily uploads for the first time in June, reaching approximately 90,000 synthetic tracks per day. A peer-reviewed study by Stanford University and Reed College researchers, published earlier this year, found that listeners engaged less deeply with music labeled as AI-generated even when a human had composed it, suggesting the disclosure itself carries a commercial penalty regardless of actual quality. Taken together with Luminate’s consumer research, the data makes a consistent case: audiences can tell the difference between what they are being offered and what they want, and what they want is still primarily music made by people. As the broader music industry navigates its most consequential AI legal battles yet, that consumer preference is one of the clearest signals available for where the commercial value actually sits.
