Meta AI ads are generating twisted limbs, wrong products, and gibberish text. Here is what is happening and what brands can do about it.
Meta AI ads were supposed to make advertising easier. For a lot of brands, they have made it stranger.
A pajama brand logs into Meta Ads Manager and finds that the AI has replaced its pajama dress with a shirt and pants. A women’s networking group in Montana discovers Meta added men to their ad. A bookshop’s Valentine’s Day campaign goes live with garbled text and products that look like knockoffs of themselves.
These are not edge cases. Business Insider spoke with eight advertisers and agency executives who said dealing with Meta AI problems had become routine.
And when brands complained? Meta’s response was simple. Its terms of service state that AI can make mistakes and that it is the advertiser’s responsibility to review the outputs.
How Meta’s AI Gets Into Your Ads
Meta has been adding AI features to its ad products for months. The tools are called Advantage+ creative enhancements. They are designed to make small tweaks to ads — adjusting brightness, cropping images, generating new backgrounds — to improve the chance someone clicks.
Some of these features are off by default. Others are not. And advertisers say bugs have been switching them on without permission.
Karissa Tuccio, executive director of social and influencer at Mediassociates, said a bug that toggled AI settings on had affected most of the 15 clients she manages on Meta. She had flagged the issue to her Meta rep as recently as last week.
REI, the outdoor retailer, drew a wave of consumer backlash last month after running an Instagram ad showing a bike with two handlebars. REI said Meta had auto-enrolled it in an AI feature that generated an image it described as “inaccurate” and “inappropriate.”
The problem is not just that the AI makes mistakes. It is that advertisers running hundreds or thousands of ads at once now have to manually check every campaign to make sure nothing has been switched on or gone wrong. That is a lot of extra work for tools that were supposed to save time.
“We somehow accepted that as a new standard operating procedure,” said Rok Hladnik, CEO of marketing agency Flat Circle, which manages around $200 million in annual Meta ad spending.
What It Actually Does to Your Brand
Weird AI ads are funny on the internet. They are less funny when it is your brand.
“When the AI starts generating weird creativity or making unapproved changes, it can quietly damage brand perception — especially for anyone who cares about consistency,” said Robert Webster, CEO of TAU Marketing, which manages around $500 million in annual ad spending across various platforms.
Abigail Hogue found that out the hard way. She is a photographer and marketer who shot a Valentine’s Day campaign for a small bookshop called Quite Literally Books. The creative was good. She was proud of it.
About 12 hours after the campaign went live, friends started sending her screenshots. The text on the products was garbled. The books looked like knockoff versions of themselves. Meta’s AI had quietly altered everything while the campaign was running.
Hogue panicked. She went into Ads Manager, turned off all AI creative enhancements, and republished the ads. Then she spent hours going back and forth with Meta customer service. Representatives told her it was a “sporadic” and “one-off occurrence.” Also a “glitch.” She asked for a refund. As of Friday, Quite Literally Books had not received one.
For small businesses with limited budgets and carefully crafted brand identities, this kind of damage is not a minor inconvenience. It is a real problem.
Why Meta Is Not Stopping
Meta’s ad business brought in around $196 billion in revenue last year. It reaches 3.5 billion daily active users. For most brands, it is simply too big to quit.
That position gives Meta a lot of room to make decisions that advertisers do not like.
“That means it can make unpopular decisions that boost its own profits with near impunity, because most advertisers cannot realistically walk away,” Webster said.
The AI tools are part of that logic. Meta wants advertisers to hand over more creative control to its systems. Less human involvement means more money flowing through the platform with less friction. The defaults are set up to encourage exactly that.
“The defaults are aggressive, the toggles are easy to miss, and the system is clearly designed to reduce friction so more money flows through the platform with less manual intervention,” Webster said.
Meta is not standing still on the quality problems. Last week it began rolling out Muse Image, a new AI image generation model from its Superintelligence Labs. It also started adding AI info labels to ads that use its tools, though users have to click through three menus to actually see them. And following backlash, Meta removed a feature that let users generate AI images from other people’s public Instagram posts, saying it “missed the mark.”
Google runs similar AI automation tools through its Performance Max product. But it has largely avoided the kind of high-profile disasters Meta has seen. As one advertiser put it, Google’s AI ads might turn out looking ugly. “It’s not like someone’s hand is missing,” he said.
What to Do If You Run Meta Ads
The honest advice is simple. Do not trust the defaults.
Every time you set up a campaign, go through the Advantage+ creative settings manually and turn off anything you did not choose to turn on. This should not be necessary. It is.
Luke Jonas, chief growth officer of marketing agency Nest Commerce, put it plainly. “A machine optimizing for 6 million advertisers will occasionally give you two handlebars.” The only way to avoid being that advertiser is to keep a human in the loop at every stage.
Check your ads after they go live. Not just at launch. Meta’s AI can make changes while a campaign is running, as Hogue found out. Set a reminder to review active ads regularly, especially for campaigns where brand consistency matters.
If something goes wrong, document everything. Screenshots of the altered ads, screenshots of your conversation with Meta support, timestamps. If you are going to ask for a refund, you will need the paper trail.
Finally, do not assume the problem has been fixed just because Meta says it has. Tuccio said a Meta rep recently told her the company had built an internal dashboard to check that AI enhancements were fully turned off for big advertisers before launch. That is not a reassuring solution. That is an admission that the problem is still there.
Meta AI ads are not going away. The platform is too big and the tools are too profitable for Meta to pull back. But brands that stay on top of their settings, review their creative, and keep humans in the loop will be in a much better position than those who trust the machine to get it right.
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