Consumers are growing weary of AI-generated content on online marketplaces, and companies are beginning to take notice.

About a year ago, online 3D model marketplace CGTrader began allowing designers to upload AI-generated assets for purchase alongside the digital models they created themselves. The platform now lists more than two million 3D models for sale, which serve as foundational components for architects, video producers, game designers, and other creatives building products around them.

CGTrader may now be a case study in how a larger supply of AI-generated products does not necessarily translate into popularity, and why buyers still favor human-made goods. A recent company report found that although one in six models uploaded to the platform was AI-generated, those assets accounted for just $1 out of every $90 in revenue and only 2.6% of sales.

“AI is entering the catalog rapidly, but buyers aren’t yet opening their wallets for it,” the report said.

The report drew on marketplace sales data from June 2025 through May 2026 and found that only 5% of CGTrader customers tried an AI model and said it worked well, compared with 20% who tried one and found the assets inadequate. In a marketplace where buyers are often looking for ready-to-use components, that split helps explain why volume alone has not translated into stronger sales for AI-generated offerings.

CGTrader CEO Dalia Lasaite said customers were not rejecting AI outright. Instead, she said, they were placing greater value on what human creators can offer, in part because humans still make better products.

“Buyers are looking for really high quality when they are shopping at the marketplace,” Lasaite told Fortune. “And as a result, they tend to prefer human-created 3D models, at least at this point.”

As AI adoption has accelerated, public attitudes toward the technology, especially in creative work, have become more complex. A 2025 Stanford University study found that when participants were given access to an online marketplace featuring both AI-generated and human-produced art, they gravitated toward AI-generated pieces, and the number of generative AI images on the platform rose rapidly. But a Pew Research Center poll last year found that half of Americans said they liked a painting less after learning it was made by AI. In a report published Tuesday, Pew said 52% of U.S. adults were “more concerned than excited” about greater AI use in daily life, up from 38% who said the same in 2022.

Dennis Zhang, a professor of marketing and supply chain, operations, and technology at Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School, said the rise of AI-generated products in marketplaces reflects more than current attitudes toward AI. He said it may also indicate how AI could shape the broader economy, especially as digital marketplaces become an early testing ground for how consumers judge machine-made versus human-made work.

“One side of economists always tells you, ‘Don’t worry about AI. For every technology revolution in human history, people re-pivot to something else to do,” Zhang told Fortune. “What we’re saying is something else: It’s not only people as workers will re-pivot to something else to do, it’s also people as consumers will re-pivot to the dimension that humans will matter more.”

The rise of AI in the marketplace

In recent working research, Zhang measured the proliferation of smartphone app launches after the wide release of coding agents Claude Code and Codex. He initially found that, compared with 2023 and 2024, the number of apps launched increased steadily, a trend that continued through 2026. After additional analyses controlling for other variables, he found that coding agents were associated with about a 160% increase in app production by April 2026 compared with the period two years earlier.

Zhang then examined how people responded to the influx of apps on the marketplace. The number of apps with more than 10 reviews fell significantly after the AI launches, suggesting users were engaging less with AI-generated apps than with human-made ones. Zhang said the results were not causal.

“There is some slight evidence showing that the products that are helped by AI in production are less attractive than the products where we had observed before, where it’s mostly human-crafted on the coding side,” he said. “However, it’s not like the AI products are unloved by everyone, right? It’s still creating utilities for the market.”

He also suggested that weaker performance for some apps may reflect the experience gap between teams. If humans still play a larger role in the concept and development, those products may still lag because they are not as polished as fully human-generated apps, which are often built by programmers with more industry experience and stronger attention to factors such as user interface. In that case, Zhang said, AI may be enabling more “vibe coders” to build more apps, but limited experience can result in lower-quality products. He described that as a labor issue.

For apps that are clearly fully AI-generated, he said consumers may be responding differently, valuing scarcity and human-added value. In that case, he described the issue as consumer psychology.

Taken together, Zhang said these attitudes may help explain how automation is integrated into work and society.

“I would actually think people’s affection or judgments of products is going to shift from the parts which are created by AI to the parts which are less likely to be created by AI,” he said.

Zhang said the evidence suggests AI will transform labor rather than largely displace jobs. He argued that the way consumers respond to AI in the marketplace—by not fully rejecting it, but by valuing human touches—also reinforces the continuing role of people in the economy.

Lasaite said CGTrader reached a similar conclusion. When AI was first introduced into 3D modeling, creators were apprehensive, she said, but that sentiment has gradually changed as AI-generated models have become faster and cheaper to produce.

“Over time, we all realized that AI will be some kind of part of our life, and we adapt,” she said. “Maybe we can be more productive and just keep the best parts of our job to ourselves, and use the AI to help with the rest.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com