Imagine spending thousands on a carefully crafted ad campaign, only to have an AI quietly swap your young male model for an elderly woman. That’s not a hypothetical. It happened to True Classic in October 2025, and it’s just one entry in a growing catalog of complaints about Meta’s AI-powered advertising tools.

Brands are pushing back against Meta’s Advantage+ suite and its underlying Andromeda ad retrieval system, citing a pattern of unauthorized alterations, anatomical impossibilities in generated imagery, and ad copy that reads like it was written by someone who has never seen the product being sold.

When AI gets creative in the wrong ways

The True Classic incident is probably the most striking example. The clothing brand ran an ad featuring a popular millennial male model. Meta’s AI tools decided that wasn’t quite right and replaced him with an elderly woman.

Kirruna, another brand advertising on the platform, found that AI-generated imagery displayed a model with a completely twisted leg. Not a subtle distortion. A full anatomical impossibility that made the ad look more like a surrealist art project than a product listing.

Then there’s Lectric, an e-bike company whose AI-modified advertisement somehow ended up featuring copy about car trunks.

The default-on problem

Meta made its Advantage+ Creative Enhancements default-on in Ads Manager, meaning brands had to actively opt out rather than opt in to AI modifications.

The result was a wave of unauthorized alterations. Color shifts that clashed with brand guidelines. Music overlays that changed the tone of video ads. Scene modifications that altered the entire context of a campaign. All happening automatically, often without advertisers realizing it until the ads were already live.

The timing of these issues coincided with major AI infrastructure upgrades that Meta rolled out in early to mid-2026, suggesting that the company may have prioritized speed of deployment over quality assurance.

Meta’s automation ambitions collide with reality

Meta has publicly set a target of achieving full AI automation of ad creation by the close of 2026. The vision includes generative creatives, where AI builds entire ads from scratch, and autonomous bidding systems that handle campaign optimization without human intervention.

What this means for investors and advertisers

For advertisers currently using Meta’s platform, the practical takeaway is straightforward: audit your Advantage+ Creative Enhancement settings immediately. Check whether default-on modifications are active on your campaigns. Review recent ad creatives for unauthorized alterations.