Google Reveals AI Use in Advertising

Google Reveals AI Usage in Advertisements

Google is rolling out a new feature aimed at helping users understand when an advertisement they see has been created using AI technology.

AI facilitates the creation of advertisements for businesses, allowing them to place their brand products in various contexts and save money on traditional e-commerce photography. However, this can also be misleading if consumers are unaware that what they are looking at is not a real product photo. Although Google prohibits misleading and false advertisements, an ad can still leverage AI to create synthetic or digitally altered content. Until now, this was only required for political ads.

The tech giant stated that this new consumer feature will be integrated into the “My Ad Center” panel, which everyone can access by clicking on the three-dot menu or the information icon of the ads they see via Google Search, YouTube, and Google Discover.

This panel already allows users to block or report ads and learn more about the advertiser or the reasons why the ad was displayed, among other things. Now, users will also see an option indicating “How this ad was created,” which will specify whether the ad was created or modified with AI.

Google claims that when advertisers use its generative advertising tools to create ads, the disclosure will be automatically activated.

However, if the ad is created elsewhere, the advertiser will need to use a new control to indicate whether AI was involved in its creation — Google will not conduct its own verification to determine if this is the case. In certain markets, the ad may also be labeled as created by AI if local law requires it.