Upscale health club Equinox’s new campaign, Question Everything But Yourself, has been live for only a few days but is already sparking cultural debate. The work pairs provocative, AI-generated images with photographs of fit, real people, urging viewers to “question everything except yourself.”
The images are intentionally unsettling, designed to tap into broader internet culture in which artificial and manipulated content increasingly blurs the line between what’s real and what’s not.
Working with agency Angry Gods, Equinox put forth AI-generated visuals such as a steak revealed to be a cake, a shirtless man with comically exaggerated muscles, a man riding a sheep like a motorcycle and a woman in a bikini with three breasts. Each surreal image is juxtaposed with athletic bodies meant to represent what can’t be faked or generated.
The approach continues Equinox’s long-standing strategy of avoiding traditional workout imagery in its advertising. Instead, the brand focuses on outcomes and the lifestyle associated with training at Equinox, rather than the act of exercise itself.
Research and ‘aliveness’ fuel the campaign
AI remains one of marketing and tech’s most charged topics, which helps explain why the campaign has struck a nerve. Research cited by the team found that 70% of people say they no longer know what information to trust. Additional estimates suggest that more than half of content on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram is now AI-generated, with projections indicating up to 90% of online content may be synthetic by 2026.
For Angry Gods, a largely freelance agency based in Los Angeles, being more human was central to the brief. Founder and CEO Krish Menon said Equinox wanted to move beyond being perceived as a lifestyle brand and toward what the company describes as “aliveness.”
“Moving from a lifestyle brand to an ‘aliveness’ brand is an interesting construct,” Menon said. “With lifestyle brands, you conjure up passive, luxury, step back, sit down. ‘Aliveness’ conjures up movement, energy, change.”
Menon added that constant exposure to overwhelming amounts of information has left many people feeling numb. The agency positioned the campaign as an antidote to that fatigue.
A video component extends the campaign across digital and social platforms, print, out-of-home placements — including Equinox club windows — and OTT streaming. The video includes intentionally jarring scenes: a woman biting into what appears to be a dog that turns out to be a gooey cake, deepfake-style clips of reporters in the water with sharks, a horse diving off a springboard and imagery reminiscent of viral moments such as the the former pope in a fashionable puffy jacket.
However, those images weren’t meant as a direct critique of AI itself, Menon said.
“The point of the images was never the subject of the image,” Menon explained. “What we wanted was a recognition of something that made [people] go, ‘Oh, I’ve seen something like that before, and it made me feel a certain way.’”
Some critics have argued the campaign contributes to so-called AI slop, but Menon sees it instead as a reflection of the current culture and said it’s meant to capture what it feels like to live alongside AI.
“Abstraction was too safe,” Menon said. “Safety rarely cuts through. Culture, as we’ve seen in the comments, is not polite about AI right now. People are disturbed. They think it’s funny. They think it’s confusing. Sanitizing that would have felt very dishonest to us.”
To arrive at the final visuals, Angry Gods and Equinox cataloged roughly 1,750 internet tropes and evaluated which would feel most immediately recognizable. Angry Gods executive creative director Gabe Miller treated internet culture as a language, identifying shared phrases and translating those references into imagery using multiple AI platforms, including Higgsfield and SeeDream.
Results keep people thinking
The reactions and conversations elicited by the campaign are exactly what Equinox and Angry Gods hoped for. The work was meant to provoke discussion — and to reinforce the idea that the human body remains one thing AI can’t shortcut.
Looking ahead, Menon said future iterations of the campaign will explore other forms of cultural falsehood, from catfishing around Valentine’s Day to counterfeit fashion during Fashion Week.
“There are falsehoods that sit within every part of culture,” he said. “When you’re surrounded by so many pulses that are becoming harder and harder to recognize, the one thing that you cannot cheat is your body. No one can do the work for you.”