Google will soon show you AI-generated ads

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Google has spent the past few weeks promoting generative AI tools that can summarize search results For the users, help them write essaysand swap cloudy skies for sunlight into perfect family photos. Today he’s showing what similar tools could do for his core business: selling ads.

New generative AI systems for ad clients will compose text on the fly to render what a person is searching for, and create product images to save them time and money on design work. The features add to the growing ranks of AI-based text and image generators that have been introduced to online services in recent months, as the capabilities of ChatGPT and its image counterpart DALL-E inspired worldwide enthusiasm for generative AI.

As the world’s biggest online ad seller by revenue, Google has been using artificial intelligence programs for years to help clients target users as well as help them design ads by automatically editing the size of images. Now, with more powerful AI models capable of tasks like generating photorealistic images, it hopes to prove that its advertising business, which accounts for 80 percent of its total sales, can also be more attractive to advertisers.

The recent spate of AI-related announcements from Google has sent shares of its parent company Alphabet soaring, suggesting that fears about the arrival of AI have eased. ChatGPT-style web search crippling Google’s search and advertising businesses.

Google offers the new features to advertisers for free, but they could boost revenue if the AI-generated text and images encourage companies to place more ads or can drive more clicks from consumers. Google’s dominant role in online ad sales means the industry could be one of the first to widely incorporate generative AI into its workflows. “We can deliver engaging and more relevant ads to users, give advertisers more creative freedom, and deliver better performance,” says Jerry Dischler, vice president overseeing Google Ads. He declined to discuss the specific financial prospects for generative AI in the announcements.

As anyone who has experimented with an AI chatbot or image generator knows, their output can be unpredictable and even nasty. And they have raised public concern about whether their development benefited from copyright infringement.

Dischler says the company will be “diligent” in monitoring the quality of images and text generated by new features, some of which are already available to advertisers in beta form. Google is rolling out some of them more widely than its main rival, Meta, which announced earlier this month that it was initially inviting select advertisers to test its own generative AI features.

Offering generative AI in ads is likely to be expensive, because the computing costs to run text and image generation models are very high. At a conference last weekMeta AI executive Aparna Ramani said generating output from such models is 1,000 times more expensive than using AI to recommend content and select users’ news sources.

One of Google’s new features now adapts English search ad text based on what a person typed into the company’s search box and Google’s data about the advertiser. Previously, every time a person searched, algorithms had to select display text from a collection that an advertiser had pre-written by hand.