"It hurts to see bad people win, but Meta, the company that burned billions trying to make the metaverse a thing, remains eye-wateringly profitable, thanks almost entirely to its advertising business, which accounted for 98 percent of its total revenue in the second quarter of 2025. And soon, if Meta executives have their way, that advertising will be powered by so-called artificial intelligence-and shocking quantities of fossil fuels-all so they can convince you to buy more stuff."
"In their earnings call October 29, Meta executives touted the growth of their tentpole advertising product, "Advantage+" which seems tuned toward letting companies fire marketing employees and replace them with AI. "The number of advertisers using at least one of our video generation features was up 20% versus the prior quarter," Meta CFO Susan Li told investors. "We've also added more generative AI features to make it easier for advertisers to optimize their ad creatives and drive increased performance.""
"This is bad for a collection of reasons you'll immediately guess. Automated generation of text, images, and videos from a massive database of mostly stolen human-created content frequently spews out results that are nonsensical, racist, or false, and sometimes violent or abusive. In Meta's case, specifically, Business Insider reports one company that found Meta's software automatically replaced a top-performing ad for millennial clothing with "an AI-generated photo of a cheerful yet unnatural granny sitting in an armchair""
Meta remains highly profitable, with advertising generating 98 percent of revenue in the second quarter of 2025. Meta promotes Advantage+, a generative-AI ad product that automates video and image creation and enables advertisers to scale personalized marketing while reducing human marketers. Generative models can automatically produce vast numbers of slightly different creatives that plug into extensive user-preference data to intensify targeted advertising. Automated outputs frequently contain nonsensical, racist, false, violent, or abusive material. Reported instances include AI replacing effective ads with incongruous images. The wide deployment of AI ad tools also raises computational energy demand and associated fossil-fuel emissions.
Read at The New Republic
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