Meta, parent company of Facebook, introduced the AI Sandbox. “Today we were sharing more details about how we’re using AI to improve the performance of ads for businesses, including a look at our AI Sandbox that’s testing generative AI capabilities for advertisers, new features in our Meta Advantage suite of ad automation tools and more details on our AI infrastructure and modeling investments that underpin it all.”
The AI Sandbox will act as our testing playground for early versions of new tools and features, including generative AI-powered ad tools. Our goal is to learn what works for advertisers and make these features easy to use in our ads tools. To start, we are building tools like text variation, background generation and image outcropping to do things like make an ad’s text more engaging or improve parts of its creative, Meta wrote.
Text Variation: Generates multiple versions of text to highlight the important points of an advertiser’s copy, giving advertisers choice to try different messages for certain audiences.
Background Generation: Creates background images from text inputs, allowing advertisers to try various backgrounds more quickly and diversify their creative assets.
Image Outcropping: Adjusts creative assets to fit different aspect ratios across multiple surfaces, like Stories or Reels, allowing advertisers to spend less time and resources on repurposing creative assets.
Meta wrote: Currently, we’re working with a small group of advertisers in order to quickly gather feedback that we can use to make these products even better. In July, we will begin gradually expanding access to more advertisers with plans to add some of these features into our products later this year.
TechCrunch reported that Meta’s announcement comes after the company’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said last month that the company was looking to use generative AI tech for ads.
According to TechCrunch, Meta had positive quarterly results for Q1 2023. The company beat analyst expectations and posted year-on-year revenue growth for the first time in three quarters. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that, while the tech giant has started working on different AI tools, it remained committed to metaverse development.
CNBC reported that, in a prepared demo, Meta showed how prompts such as “NYC street blurred” and “snow mountain blurred abstract high quality” would generate the corresponding background image behind a product. With image cropping, advertisers are able to automatically adjust images to be the correct size across Meta’s platforms. If an advertiser wants to post on Instagram’s main feed as well as Stories and Reels, for example, it will only have to adjust one image for all three.
Personally, I find most ads on social media to be annoying and obtrusive, especially if the ad has nothing to do with my interests. I’m definitely not a fan of having an AI replace an actual human artist who could do the same work with more insight, depth, and understanding of the target market.
People join social media because their friends and family are there. Nobody decides to join a social media site because they are delighted to see tons of adds that clutter up their feed and push away the content from the people they enjoy interacting with.