Meta's AI tools are going rogue and churning out some very strange ads (www.businessinsider.com)

Meta’s Advantage+ creative tools have been generating bizarre, brand-damaging ads for some advertisers — think an AI “granny” replacing a top-performing millennial model, a model with a contorted leg, and a flying-car-trunk image for an e‑bike ad. Several brands report those AI-generated creatives ran despite toggling off options, and some didn’t appear in campaign previews, so advertisers only discovered them after customers complained or flagged refunds. The glitches persisted across settings like “test new creative features,” “automatic adjustments,” and other Advantage+ switches; some marketers say the toggles auto‑reenabled themselves, forcing teams to manually audit accounts multiple times a week. This episode highlights a core tension for the AI/ML ad ecosystem: automation at scale can speed creative production but also amplifies hallucinations, loss of control, and brand risk when models are treated as black boxes. Technical pain points include hidden or auto‑enabled feature flags, insufficient prelaunch visibility (previews must be opened per variant), and the combinatorial explosion of generated ad versions for large campaigns. The fallout is practical — extra manual QA, new third‑party tooling (e.g., AdsFlow), customer refunds, and reputational harm — and strategic: advertisers will demand clearer governance, better human‑in‑the‑loop safeguards, and transparent model behavior before ceding creative control. Meta says advertisers see value in Advantage+ and can review generated images, and that it’s iterating on the tools.