Meta launches new AI-generated image and text features for advertisers
The new capabilities are designed to help brands ramp up their social content strategies without veering from their core messaging and aesthetic.
Meta's CFO recently told investors that the company plans to "invest aggressively" in AI. / Adobe Stock
Meta continues accelerating its generative AI investments with new creative features designed for advertisers. The tech giant today unveiled a suite of new AI-powered tools, each designed to help brands quickly create social media marketing content.
John Hegeman, Meta’s head of monetization, told reporters at Meta’s Manhattan headquarters on Tuesday morning that the new generative AI features will not be available to advertisers promoting political or social campaigns. In November last year, the company announced that all such advertisers would need to disclose any use of AI or other digital alteration tools when posting to any of its platforms.
Hegeman added during the Tuesday press conference that Meta is still developing policies around watermarking for AI-generated ads and will have those in place before the new features, which are currently in a testing phase, are globally deployed. The company already applies labels to images generated through its Meta AI tool, and in February it announced plans to begin doing the same for AI-generated images shared on Instagram, Facebook and Threads.
The first new feature announced today enables advertisers to generate variants of existing ad images.“ For example, imagine you are promoting your coffee bean business by advertising a steaming cup of coffee,” Meta wrote in a blog post, “our generative AI will be able to create other variations of your ad creative, including scenery that embodies a lush and idyllic farm, and also provide adjustments to the coffee cup to offer you more creative options you can choose [from].”
Images can also be refitted to various aspect ratios to accommodate posts for Reels and Facebook.
The new AI-generated imagery features have begun to roll out and will be followed with an option to generate background images via a text-prompt interface “in the coming months,” according to the company.
Meta has also launched a new AI-generated text feature for ad headlines. The brand wrote in a blog post that it’s in the process of testing a capability for the underlying AI model to gradually recognize and reflect a particular brand’s unique voice and tone when generating text.
The new text-generation feature has also begun to roll out, and Meta aims to have it available globally by the end of this year. According to the company, it will also soon be integrated with Llama 3, the latest iteration of Meta’s open-source large language model.
Following its first-quarter earnings report last month, Meta chief financial officer Susan Li told investors the company plans to “invest aggressively” in the coming year, which would likely increase its capital expenditures. Investors were clearly rattled – the company’s stock fell by about 10% following the call.
Meta isn’t the only big tech company that’s been leaning into generative AI for advertisers. Adobe, for example, recently unveiled a bundle of new creative features for brands based on its Firefly model.
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