Advertisers say Meta's AI ad tools routinely distort products and toggle on without consent, forcing extra work. With $196B in revenue, Meta can make unpopular decisions, but glitches risk brand damage.
Alpha Score of 57 reflects moderate overall profile with weak momentum, weak value, strong quality, moderate sentiment.
Meta's push to embed AI tools into its ad platform is generating errors that distort product images and rewrite text. The glitches have become routine. Advertisers say they must double-check every campaign to prevent misrepresentations from going live.
Business Insider spoke with eight advertisers and agency executives who described the problems. Jessica Gleim, an ads consultant for female-founded brands, said Meta's AI recommendations for a pajama dress client swapped the dress for a shirt and pants. For a networking group for women in Montana, Meta suggested adding men to the ads. "It's not usable to help my clients grow their business," Gleim said.
Outdoor retailer REI drew consumer backlash last month after an Instagram ad showed a bicycle with two handlebars. REI said Meta had "auto-enrolled" it in an AI feature that generated an "inaccurate" and "inappropriate" image. Meta's terms of service state that "AI can make mistakes and that it is the advertiser's responsibility to review the AI outputs," a company spokesperson said.
Advertisers said a separate bug had toggled AI settings on without their consent. Karissa Tuccio, executive director of social and influencer at Mediassociates, said the bug had affected most of her 15 clients. She said she flagged it to a Meta representative as recently as last week. Tuccio said the rep offered a quality-control dashboard for big ad launches, which she took as evidence the bug was not resolved.
Around Valentine's Day, photographer Abigail Hogue uploaded an ad campaign for a small bookstore. She had shot creative assets with chocolates, macarons, candles, and books. About 12 hours later, friends sent screenshots of ads with garbled text and distorted products. She turned off AI enhancements and spent hours with Meta customer service. Representatives called it a "sporadic" and "one-off occurrence" and a "glitch." She requested a refund. The bookstore had not received one as of Friday afternoon.
Meta's ad business generated about $196 billion in revenue last year. Its reach of 3.5 billion daily active users and sophisticated targeting make it hard for advertisers to leave, even when problems arise. Robert Webster, CEO of TAU Marketing, which manages around $500 million in annual ad spending across platforms, said Meta could "make unpopular decisions that boost its own profits with near impunity" because most advertisers cannot walk away.
The glitches carry risk. Webster said the errors can "quietly damage brand perception – especially for anyone who cares about consistency." Meta is rolling out its Muse Image model to improve creative generation. It also removed a feature that let users generate images from others' public Instagram posts after backlash.
Gleim summed up the trade-off: "Meta's still the best platform. It has the most robust options. It has the most data."
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