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Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

businessinsider.com

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Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#51

Post by immibis »

redsymbol wrote: post #30

I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on. I think the current UX of the ad manager w…

Why class action? Sounds like you think you could sue individually. I'm not convinced, but you are.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#52

Post by immibis »

design2203 wrote: post #12
agumonkey wrote: post #4

there will be a chapter some day on the link or limit between human involvement and emotion, and the economic value of something for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole

Because there is an obsession re. Financial wealth as opposed to the creation of real wealth. The two are not the same. The connection between the two has seemingly been lost.

The way around this, by the way, is to create some kind of alternative exchange system that only admits real-for-real exchange and makes hoarding money impossible.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#53

Post by Terr_ »

chuckadams wrote: post #19

> Three advertisers also said they'd encountered a problem where Meta automatically switched those toggles to "on," even when they'd explicitly turned them off — meaning they inadvertently spent their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn't intend to run. Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|

One of the enshittification patterns: Abuse the middleman formerly applied just one side eventually gets applied to the other as well.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#54

Post by silisili »

bondarchuk wrote: post #38
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #7

Ads are one of those things that are pretty much universally hated by every person on the planet and yet companies/platforms continue to find innovative ways to make them more insufferable.

If they were universally hated it would be easy to outlaw them through democratic means. Yet bring this up to the average person and they'll quickly find 500 reasons why it shouldn't be done. The only reasonable conclusion (sad as it may be) is most people don't actually hate ads.

I'm always baffled by this. The only exposure I have to video ads at all anymore are the 3 or so football games I might watch per year OTA. Each time, I'm always absolutely blown away by both the amount of and content of the ads and how maddening they are.

I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm syndrome.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#55

Post by lukev »

Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything) is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored.

There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn.

This feels kind of like that.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#56

Post by lawlessone »

hollerith wrote: post #42
lawlessone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we(AI ads) be hitting this? "Supernormal Stimulus" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

Newspapers and cheap gin were already supernormal stimuli 200 years ago.

I think you can add to that things like fast foods, snacks etc with carefully tuned levels of fats , salts, sugars etc to keep people eating.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#57

Post by garganzol »

Pretty much what Google did back in 2021 or so - all the ads suddenly became "adaptive" - meaning that they started to produce funky texts trying to lure the unassuming viewers. Needless to say that those generated texts sometimes were unprofessional / borderline ignorant. The worst thing is the impossibility to turn that junk generation off.

It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#58

Post by redsymbol »

ffuxlpff wrote: post #17

We are all waiting for plot twist that these actually work better than human made ads and the weirder they get the worse humans can compete with them.

Yeah, as someone who spends a lot of money every month buying Meta ads, I had that thought looking at some of the article's examples.

But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that would be expensive for many companies in the long run.

Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to accidentally approve something you shouldn't).

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#59

Post by esseph »

bondarchuk wrote: post #38
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #7

Ads are one of those things that are pretty much universally hated by every person on the planet and yet companies/platforms continue to find innovative ways to make them more insufferable.

If they were universally hated it would be easy to outlaw them through democratic means. Yet bring this up to the average person and they'll quickly find 500 reasons why it shouldn't be done. The only reasonable conclusion (sad as it may be) is most people don't actually hate ads.

Everybody hates daylight savings time but we still have it.

54% of people are creeped out by targeted ads, 79% of mobile and 73% of desktop users are "frustrated" by the current ad load, and 70% of customers across the board find digital advertising "annoying and unpleasant".

(I have a self-held theory that roughly 30% of people are... interesting to say the least.)

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#60

Post by hollerith »

lawlessone wrote: post #56
hollerith wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newspapers and cheap gin were already supernormal stimuli 200 years ago.

I think you can add to that things like fast foods, snacks etc with carefully tuned levels of fats , salts, sugars etc to keep people eating.

And cheap paperback novels, movies, TV, pornography and video games. The amount of stimulation or positive reward available through these things with only a small effort and a small risk and a short waiting time are much greater than anything available in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness with a similar degree of effort, risk and waiting time.
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