According to a Business Insider investigation involving eight advertisers and agencies, Meta's AI ad creation tools regularly produce distorted visuals: twisted limbs, illegible text, products altered beyond recognition. Meta's reply is that checking the results is the advertiser's responsibility, in line with its terms of service.
The facts
- The retailer REI faced a wave of criticism after an Instagram ad generated by Meta's AI showed a bicycle with two handlebars; Meta explains that the account had been enrolled in the feature automatically.
- At a brand followed by consultant Jessica Gleim, Meta's AI replaced a nightdress with a shirt and trousers on an ad visual; in another campaign, it added men to the visuals of an ad aimed at a women's group.
- Meta's advertising business generated around $196 billion in revenue last year, with 3.5 billion daily users: a weight that limits advertisers' ability to turn away from the platform.
Why are these errors becoming routine for advertisers?
The problem starts with the default settings: several agencies interviewed describe AI features switched on automatically, toggles that are easy to miss, and bugs that re-enable the options even after they have been turned off. One agency director reports that the bug was still affecting most of her clients the week before the investigation, despite repeated reports to her Meta contact.
Meta has introduced labels flagging the use of AI, as well as a quality control dashboard. The latter, however, remains reserved for large advertisers who ask for it and is not enabled by default. For everyone else, the only protection is a systematic manual check before every launch, an extra workload that several agencies already regard as the new routine of the job.
AIxH's view
This is the ground covered by our Meta advertising service in Luxembourg: generative AI speeds up creative production, and it needs systematic human control before anything goes live rather than trust by default. Our method, AI x humans, puts people in charge: every Meta campaign we run goes through a manual check of AI activations before launch. If you want to audit the AI settings of your Meta campaigns, a first conversation is enough to identify the points to watch.