Equinox Subverts AI With a Brilliant, Unsettling Ad Campaign

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In 2026, AI-generated images are no longer a fringe novelty. They’re everywhere, bleeding into visual culture, warping aesthetics, and slowly eroding our ability to tell what’s real from what’s fabricated. In that landscape, some brands smooth out their messaging. Others lean into the discomfort.

That’s the route Equinox has chosen with its new global campaign, “Question Everything But Yourself.”

Created with agency Angry Gods, the work uses AI as a mirror held up to the moment, only to remind us that effort itself can’t be synthesized.

The creative device is deceptively simple. On one side: deliberately uncanny AI visuals pulled straight from the chaos of modern feeds, hyper-muscular torsos, a bikini-clad woman with three breasts, and other surreal scenarios that echo viral deepfakes and algorithmic hallucinations. On the other: real bodies, photographed in the physical world, athletic, grounded, earned.

The contrast isn’t decorative. It’s confrontational. The work is designed to trigger a split-second pause – What am I looking at? – before pulling viewers back to something tangible: muscle, breath, sweat, discipline. According to Equinox and Angry Gods, the goal was to avoid a “safe” abstraction. Discomfort is the creative raw material.

Equinox anchors the campaign in a stark cultural insight: trust in what we see online is collapsing. The brand cites research suggesting that 70% of people say they no longer know which information to trust on the internet, alongside projections that up to 90% of online content could be AI-generated by 2026.

Rather than positioning itself as a moral referee, Equinox makes a strategic choice, defending the body as non-negotiable territory. AI can generate flawless imagery in seconds. It can’t replicate what the body feels, endures, and builds over time. That tension is the heart of the line: Question everything… except yourself.

The campaign is designed to live everywhere, social, digital, print, out-of-home, Equinox storefronts, and OTT platforms. And predictably, it’s divisive. Some applaud the clarity of its stance on AI culture; others criticize it for borrowing the very aesthetic it claims to critique.

That tension is intentional. The work isn’t meant to resolve the conversation, it’s meant to start one. Equinox has already hinted at extending the idea into other “false realities,” from catfishing to counterfeits. For now, this first chapter lands a clear stake: in a world where images can lie, the body remains an anchor.