• These days, using AI for advertising is an increasingly common practice.
• However, advertisers must deal with the multiple legal risks associated with this technology, including false advertising and copyright infringement.
• By hiring a talented ad agency, you can make AI part of your ad strategy while keeping these risks under control.

5 Ways to Legally Use AI for Advertising on Facebook

If you have even a passing interest in technology, you’ve probably heard about the growing prominence and power of artificial intelligence (AI). For advertising in particular, AI usage has exploded in popularity lately. As of 2024, the global market for AI in marketing was an estimated $35.99 billion—up from $12.05 billion in 2020.

However, relying too heavily on AI or misusing this technology could lead to unexpected problems. If you create ads with AI without taking a few precautions, you could have trouble copyrighting your ads, accidentally infringe on someone else’s copyrights, or even lose legal protection of your trade secrets—just to name a few potential issues.

Still, this doesn’t mean you should avoid making this technology part of your digital marketing strategy. By working with qualified ad experts who know how to use artificial intelligence the right way, you can enjoy AI’s many benefits while minimizing your legal risks.

Legal Guidelines for AI Ad Creation

Artificial intelligence is a promising tool for advertisers, but it certainly isn’t free of dangers. When your ad experts use generative AI as part of their ad creation process, they’ll need to:

1. Document Their Process

Can works created with the use of AI be copyrighted? You might assume the answer to this question is “no,” but the U.S. Copyright Office suggests otherwise—assuming human creators are still fully in charge of the creative process, that is. As a policy statement from this office put it, “the term ‘author,’ which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans.”

So, while fully AI-generated advertisements are not eligible for copyright in America, ads created by humans with AI assistance could still benefit from this form of legal protection. With that in mind, your ad agency should carefully document every step in the process it used to create your ads, including:

• The prompts initially provided to the AI
• Any steps taken to change these prompts later
• Modifications to the AI’s output

2. Watch Out for Copyright Infringement

Today’s leading AI systems were trained by analyzing massive amounts of data, and that data is reflected in their output. That means AI services can occasionally create images or text that include recognizable sections of their training data.

Due to this situation, using AI-generated advertising materials always comes with a risk of copyright infringement (and subsequent reputational damage). Thus, your ad experts should do their due diligence by carefully reviewing your ad creatives for potential copyright issues.

3. Closely Review Claims

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission and state/local laws prohibit advertisers from making claims that are unsubstantiated, misleading, or outright false. The penalties for doing so can be severe—if you are responsible for false advertising, you may face everything from cease and desist orders to substantial fines. That’s before you consider these additional forms of financial loss:

• Covering legal fees 
• Replacing advertising materials
• Providing refunds
• Responding to complaints from customers
• Dealing with damaged consumer trust and decreased sales

The use of AI for advertising does not exempt advertisers from legal restrictions on false advertising. Making matters worse, AI chatbots have a tendency to “hallucinate” information, resulting in answers that seem rational at first glance but are completely incorrect. To prevent this issue from affecting your ad campaign, your ad experts need to watch out for inaccuracies in AI-generated ad copy.

4. Follow the Terms of Use

Whenever your ad team uses a third-party service while creating marketing materials, it must abide by that service’s terms of use—and that’s definitely the case for AI technologies. No matter what system your ad agency plans to use for your ads, a quick overview of its terms of use will clarify the ownership rights of its output (among other notable rights).

AI-related terms of use aren’t the only guidelines your marketing agency should pay attention to. In order to avoid unexpected trouble while advertising on Meta platforms, your ad experts will also have to follow Facebook’s terms and conditions for advertisers and Meta’s advertising standards.

5. Avoid Using Confidential Information

While using AI as part of the ad creation process, your ad agency will use prompts to get the outputs they’re looking for. However, AI programs can store these prompts for model training—which means confidential or sensitive information about your business should never be included.

If your ad experts mention protected information in their prompts, this could be considered a breach of confidentiality, resulting in liability. Trade secrets provided to AI could also lose their legal protection, as trade secret owners must “make reasonable efforts, or employ reasonable means” to protect these secrets. Meanwhile, prompts that include personal information may violate the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and other federal and state laws.

Understanding Facebook’s AI Advertising Tools

When your ad experts follow these guidelines, they’ll be well on their way to creating high-quality (and low-risk) ads with the help of AI. Of course, they’ll also need in-depth knowledge of the tools available to them in this category—including the Meta Advantage suite. This suite covers Meta Advantage and Meta Advantage+, which collectively offer capabilities related to:

• Ad placement. With the help of Advantage+, ad agencies don’t have to spend time thinking about ad placement. Instead, they can let this system find powerful, low-cost placements on their behalf, improving your campaign performance and giving them more time to focus on their other duties.
• Ad targeting. Both Advantage and Advantage+ can easily present your ads to members of your target audience. On top of that, these systems can determine when showing ads to people outside of this audience would be likely to pay off.
• Creative adjustment. Creatives are at the heart of any advertising campaign. Advantage+ can make your creatives even more effective by applying image enhancements and automatically selecting songs.
• Creative generation. In May 2024, Meta announced the addition of new generative AI features to Advantage+. These allow advertisers to generate image variations and text for their ads.
• Budget allocation. When some of your ad campaigns are doing better than others, your ad agency should be able to change your budget in response. Advantage can help by automatically putting extra resources toward particularly successful ad sets.
• Optimization. Finally, Meta’s system lets advertisers know about Advantage or Advantage+ capabilities that may improve a campaign’s performance after it goes live.

Get AI-Powered Ads You Can Count On

If you run a small business, you may have considered using AI for advertising as an alternative to finding outside help. However, this isn’t necessarily the best idea if you’re going it alone—as you can see, misusing this technology could lead to serious legal trouble. On top of that, you won’t be able to unlock the full potential of these powerful tools without in-depth knowledge of the advertising industry.

As a result, you’ll still want to find ad experts who know everything there is to know about digital advertising. Entrepreneurs in North Carolina and beyond can count on Social Ktchn to handle their business’s presence on Facebook and Instagram—we have well over a decade of combined experience in advertising and marketing, and we know how to utilize AI while keeping legal risks at bay. If you’re interested in working with our team, drop us a line!