Meta will let advertisers create campaigns using new AI tools

Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms Inc. is testing new tools that will let advertisers create marketing material, including images and messaging, using generative AI prompts.

If an advertiser uploads a photo of their product, Meta’s artificial intelligence tools can now generate new, different images of that product for marketing purposes. That feature is already live for some advertisers. In the coming months, marketers will also be able to use text prompts to create different versions of the original image, the company said Tuesday.

Meta’s AI tools can also generate text for advertisements, including headlines and primary ad copy. “We are currently testing the ability for the generated text to reflect your brand’s voice and tone, by highlighting key selling points based on your previous campaigns and text input,” Meta wrote in a blog post explaining the new tools.

Meta advertisers can already use generative AI to change the background of an image that they upload to the system, but Tuesday’s announcement expands those capabilities as part of the company’s broader push into the technology. Eventually, Meta hopes to let advertisers create brand new marketing images using only a text prompt and without the need for an original image.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a major selling point for the company’s business in recent years, a focus that has helped drive the stock price up. The company is using AI advancements to power its recommendation algorithms that determine what posts people see in their social network feeds, and has also created an AI-powered chatbot that exists in several of the company’s apps.

The advertiser updates come just a few weeks after Meta’s first-quarter earnings report, during which the company surprised investors by announcing it was increasing its annual budget for capital expenditures, including AI-related technologies.

The vast majority of the company’s advertisers are small- and medium-sized businesses that tend to have smaller budgets for creating a professional marketing campaign. In theory, those companies could eventually use Meta’s generative AI tools to create promotional texts and images for free, cutting down on costs.