Google (might) tell you when ads have been created with AI

Artificial intelligence is now so prevalent that it is near impossible to avoid. From posts on social media, to news articles and even ads, AI is pretty much everywhere – and Google is taking steps to help keep people informed about what they are looking at. At least that is the idea. Google is introducing a new “How this ad was made” section to the My Ad Center panel which is intended to reveal when AI was used in the creation of an ad. But it will not work all of the time as the company explains. Announcing the news... [Continue Reading]

Google (might) tell you when ads have been created with AI Artificial intelligence is now so prevalent that it is near impossible to avoid. From posts on social media, to news articles and even ads, AI is pretty much everywhere – and Google is taking steps to help keep people informed about what they are looking at. At least that is the idea.

Google is introducing a new “How this ad was made” section to the My Ad Center panel which is intended to reveal when AI was used in the creation of an ad. But it will not work all of the time as the company explains. Announcing the news in a blog post, Google says: “As generative AI opens up new ways for businesses large and small to create ads, we’re introducing additional transparency features across our advertising products.

We want to help people better understand the ads they see, while providing advertisers with straightforward tools to navigate evolving industry standards”. Google continues: We're adding a “How this ad was made” section to the My Ad Center panel, accessible globally by selecting the three-dot menu or info icon on ads across Search, YouTube and Discover. This panel will indicate if an ad was created or edited with AI.

So Google will only be able to tell you if an ad has been cretaed using its own AI tools, not those from other companies. There is an argument that this greatly reduces the purpose of the information section, but Google would counter that it is probably better than nothing. We want to make managing AI disclosures as simple as possible for advertisers.

So when they use Google’s generative AI advertising tools to create ads, we’ll automatically add a disclosure to each ad’s My Ad Center panel. And when they create ads elsewhere, we’re introducing a control so they can easily indicate if they used generative AI. Based on local requirements, a label may also appear directly on the ad, either automatically or when an advertiser uses this control.

These updates build on our ongoing AI transparency work. We already embed imperceptible signals, like SynthID, into outputs from our generative AI tools. And in 2023, we introduced a requirement to disclose synthetic or digitally altered content in election ads.

The company concludes by adding: “Our existing ad policies already serve as important safeguards, along with our work to verify advertisers and share who’s behind an ad. We continue to prohibit misleading and deceptive ads, whether created with AI or not, to keep the platform safe for everyone”.