Well, it’s official: the AI arms race has well and truly begun. To many outsiders, it seems like Chat GPT has leaped ahead of traditional internet giants such as Google, Meta and Apple with its AI technology. Not true, says Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.

How is Meta looking to bring generative AI to ads?

Bosworth has said that while not the first, Meta is the best in regards to AI technology.

Andrew Bosworth, CTO, Meta, via Nikkei Asia

“We feel very confident that … we are at the very forefront. Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams.”

Bosworth continued to say that he expects to see some commercialisation of AI technology in 2023 – which leads us to generative AI tools for adverts.

One way to improve ad performance is to use AI and apply that technology across Facebook and Instagram. Technology such as this could help advertisers create better content, more quickly, and produce campaigns that optimise ad placement, deliver better results and crucially, earn Meta more money via advertising.

According to Bosworth, a marketer using Meta’s AI could ask the AI to “make images for my company that work for different audiences,” which can save time and money as well as result in better performances.

Generative AI is a content creation tool

Technology such as this falls under the umbrella of generative AI. Generative AI describes artificial intelligence that can create content such as code, audio, images and video. 

Meta has been working hard on its generative AI offering. It has even created a new team to focus specifically on commercialisation in that area – and Bosworth told Nikkei Asia that Generative AI is the area he, as well as Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, spend more of their time.

In short, all the big guns are working on it so you can expect Meta to announce some Generative AI products in the future.

AI and the Metaverse: A good match?

Meta has plans to take Generative AI into the virtual world. The Metaverse might not have captured imaginations in the way the company hoped, but there is the desire to use technology to create engaging and accessible virtual worlds.

Andrew Bosworth, CTO, Meta, via Nikkei Asia

“Previously if I wanted to create a 3D world, I needed to learn a lot of computer graphics and programming. In the future, you might be able to just describe the world you want to create and have the large language model generate that world for you. And so it makes things like content creation much more accessible to more people.”

How AI can help marketers

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature is estimated to cost Meta $10bn in 2022 – and the company needs to earn that money back from somewhere. Reels are also not generating heaps of cash – so turning to Generative AI to help increase ad earnings seems to be the direction Meta will turn to.

A startup called Omneky has already used Generative AI tech to create visuals and text for social media ads. Omneky is a software-as-a-service platform that lets marketers connect it to their social media accounts. Next, it pulls performance data from your old ad campaigns and highlights the stats on a dashboard. 

Marketers can then use the dashboard to make data-driven decisions and ask the platform to create new visuals and text for adverts based on top-performing keywords. Omneky can generate multiple options and take brand identity into account.

AI Generated videos

Meanwhile, Movio is designed to use AI to make videos featuring talking human avatars. It features a drag-and-drop interface to make content creation easy for advertisers. The videos are fronted by a realistic avatar, with speech generated by text input.

Josh Xu, Founder and CEO, Movio, via Tech Crunch

“Videos are powerful — just imagine if marketers can send emails with talking human avatars instead of plain text.”

Both features take the heavy lifting out of content creation and will help marketers to optimise adverts (Omneky) and marketing emails (Movio) with very little extra time spent on the content creation process.