Tech executives have been discussing for a long time how AI can revolutionize the advertising industry. In particular, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been extremely vocal about how the company wants his company to lead the transformation.
Speaking on stage at Stripe’s annual session meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday, Zuckerberg has planned to automate the entire advertising industry with a black box end-to-end AI advertising tool.
According to Zuckerberg, a key component of such a product must place thousands of AI-generated “test” ads before users on Facebook, Instagram and threads.
“The basic end goal here is that businesses can come to us, what their purpose is – we’ll have new customers do this or sell these things – tell us how willing they pay to achieve those results and connect their bank accounts. “In a way, it’s like the ultimate business outcome machine. I think this will become one of the most important and valuable AI systems to be built.”
Zuckerberg first described the virtual machine last week in Ben Thompson’s Stratechery Podcast. Zuckerberg assumed during the ads of the session that Meta continues to exist for creative ad agencies to deploy this AI, while SMEs cannot “start with creative,” and Meta can simply handle all advertising operations.
In fact, during the session, Zuckerberg argued that Meta’s advertising tools (some of which have generative AI capabilities) were already well-refined. Meta’s tools are better able to find users of interest than human marketers can, Zuckerberg argues. The next logical step is to apply this data-driven optimization to a creative aspect.
“We’ll come up with 4,000 different versions of your creatives, test them and figure out which one is best,” says Zuckerberg.
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This kind of solution could appeal to businesses, but this is publicly available, given that what AI ad testing does for the meta platform from a user experience standpoint, is already flooded with generative AI slops.
Meta experimented with comments on AI generated images and feeds. AI chatbot users can now interact. The company recently launched a social portal and a dedicated app that highlights generative AI content. Currently, yet another category of generative AI (ADS) appears to be poised to wear the Meta social media ecosystem.
If the user is a product of Meta’s platform and the advertiser is not a customer, it is likely to become crystal. Testing AI-generated ads can provide value to businesses, but users will have to suffer through more slops.
The advertising industry will not be able to be kind to Zuckerberg’s vision either.
There was an important backlash against the ethics of using generated AI in creative fields. In October 2024, more than 11,000 creators signed an open letter denounced the use of human-generated art to train AI systems. The creators have also filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI art tools such as Midjourney and Stability AI.
To be fair, there are many creators and advertising executives who believe that AI tools will not immediately threaten their livelihoods. Johnny Hornby, founder of advertising agency The & Partnership, announced OP-ED on Tuesday, claiming that creating a successful branding campaign remains a human challenge.
In any case, Zuckerberg appears to have a rather clear idea of how to automate the advertising industry and fill Meta’s feed with AI, whether it’s an ad agency or user.