The cigar industry has built its reputation on craft and authenticity. Some brands are now using AI to produce their marketing content, and it is embarrassing.

AI content generation has become common practice across marketing and media, and the cigar industry is not immune. Brands are using it to produce promotional imagery, video content, and visual marketing material. AI image generation tools can produce photographs that look, at a glance, like they were shot on location. A rolling room in Nicaragua. A Cuban tobacco field at golden hour. A perfectly lit humidor stacked with aged cigars. None of it is real.

Beyond brand marketing, something stranger is emerging. Fictitious AI-generated characters are appearing across cigar social media, posting content, forming opinions, and attracting audiences. People are leaving comments, they’re having discussions and they’re engaging, earnestly, with something that does not exist. The cigar industry is a small world built on genuine expertise and real relationships, and it is now making space for personalities that have neither.

AI Content Is Like Lying to Your Audience

The most detailed work on this comes from a 2025 study published in the Journal of Business Research, conducted by researchers Colleen Kirk at the New York Institute of Technology and Julian Givi at West Virginia University.

The study ran seven separate experiments testing how consumers respond to marketing content when they believe it was written by AI rather than a human. To ensure the results were reliable, the method was formally registered before any data was collected. This means the findings could not be adjusted or selected after the fact. Across all seven experiments, the content itself stayed the same. The only thing that changed was whether participants thought a human or an AI had produced it.

The results were consistent every time. When people believed the content was AI-generated, they were less likely to recommend the brand and less loyal to it. The emotional response the researchers recorded was not mild disappointment or passing indifference. They identified it as moral disgust, the kind of reaction people have when they believe they are being lied to or that something dishonest is being done to them. Not that the content was poor quality, but that they had been misled, that something was presented as genuine when it was not.

The study also found that the type of content matters. Straightforward factual information produced a weaker version of this response. The real damage happened with emotional content, material designed to connect someone to a brand, a story, or an experience. That is where the trust penalty was most severe, and that is the finding that should concern anyone producing marketing content in a category that depends on people actually believing what they are seeing.

Why It Is Worse in The Cigar Industry

The cigar industry sells itself on craft. Every piece of marketing language in this category circles back to the same ideas: handmade, heritage, quality, the human skill behind the product. Brands spend considerable time and money making sure you understand that what you are holding took years of knowledge and decades of tradition to produce. And then some of those same brands turn around and produce their content with AI, which is not just lazy, it is a contradiction so obvious it borders on insulting.

You cannot tell people your product is the result of generations of human craft and then outsource your storytelling to AI. The two things do not sit together. Premium and luxury categories depend on the belief that effort and expertise exist at every level, not just in the product but in how it is presented, discussed, and brought to the consumer. AI content signals the opposite. It signals that the brand could not be bothered, that content is a box to tick rather than an extension of the standard they claim to hold themselves to, and that the authenticity they sell so confidently stops the moment it starts to cost them something.

A brand that genuinely believes in what it makes does not cut corners on how it presents itself. If the craft is real, show it. If you cannot afford to show it properly, that is a business problem. Using AI to paper over it is not a solution, it is a demonstration of where your values actually stop.

AI Influencers

There is a specific type of content creator emerging in the cigar space that deserves its own discussion. They have a name, a visual identity, a consistent posting schedule, and a growing audience. They also do not exist. Behind the character is a real person who has made a deliberate decision to say things publicly that they would not say under their own name.

The question worth asking is why. If the opinions are worth publishing, if they are informed enough to attract an audience, if they are valuable enough to build a platform around, why does the person behind them need to hide? The answer, in most cases, is that they do not hold up under scrutiny. The character can say whatever it likes because the character has no professional reputation at stake. It cannot be challenged in any meaningful way because it does not exist. If the opinions turn out to be wrong, uninformed, or simply ridiculous, the person behind it walks away untouched.

This is not creativity, It’s a way of participating in an industry conversation without accepting any of the accountability. Real voices in this industry, people who have spent years developing genuine knowledge and are willing to put their name to what they say, operate under a completely different set of conditions. They can be questioned, disagreed with, and held to what they have said. That accountability is what gives their opinions the value and weight in the first place.

It’s like taking advice from a cartoon character, however, a cartoon character is honest about what it is.

Final Thoughts

The cigar industry is small enough that reputation travels and shortcuts are quickly noticed. Brands using AI to produce their content are not saving themselves money, they are spending something far more valuable instead.

The people hiding behind fictional personas and fake AI characters should remember: you can only fool some of the people some of the time.

Ultimately, if you make something worth being proud of, show it properly. If you have an opinion worth sharing, put your name to it. This industry is too good for AI slop, and the people in it deserve better than that.