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In the not-too-distant future, full-length video ads could be generated entirely by artificial intelligence. That’s Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision, anyway.
By the end of 2025, Meta is aiming to provide brands with the AI tools they’ll need to completely automate the advertisement production process, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
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Advertising is Meta’s primary revenue stream, and the company has already introduced some AI tools that allow brands to modify and personalize their ads. But now the company reportedly wants to expand those capabilities, making it possible for AI to create ads from the ground up — generating everything from concept to video assets to sound.
AI’s role in advertising so far
AI has long been leveraged in the advertising sector, but this has taken place mostly behind the scenes. For example, brands rely on algorithms to forecast consumer behavior, to tailor campaign messaging to specific audiences, and — since the arrival of ChatGPT — to generate ad copy.Â
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AI-generated video in ads has been a perilous endeavor. Some early efforts, like the unintentionally haunting Toys R’ Us homage to its founder, was created using OpenAI’s Sora and met with widespread ridicule online. A Volkswagen ad that used generative AI to create a deepfake version of the late Brazilian singer Elis Regina also stirred controversy around matters of consent.
But as the quality of AI-generated video has continued to improve, it’s become difficult to imagine that it won’t eventually automate at least some critical roles in industries such as filmmaking and advertising. Models like Runway’s Gen-4 and Google’s Veo 3 are able to generate photorealistic video from text prompts, offering brands glimpses of a future in which they’ll be able to dramatically save on expenses once devoted to location scouting, huge film crews, and production costs.
Keeping a human in the loop
Meta does not yet know what tools it has in mind to fully automate the ad production process. But as WSJ notes in its report, such tools would likely be most useful to small and midsize businesses that currently lack the budget for larger-scale ad productions.
Like every major tech developer, Meta is unlikely to declare that its new AI-powered advertising tools will displace human workers. Rather, it will almost certainly position them as automated assistants, augmenting human creativity.
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This has been a recurring refrain from tech companies as their powerful new generative AI tools start to reshape creative industries. OpenAIÂ and ElevenLabs, for example, have continually asserted that their models will empower, rather than replace, humans.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
As AI-generated video tools continue to improve, humans will likely need to remain in the loop, if only as overseers. Even the most powerful models are still prone to the occasional hallucination, and they require careful prompting (which has become something of an art form in and of itself). As Meta and its competitors keep rolling out new and more advanced AI tools to advertisers, brands will need to remain flexible, shifting the requirements of particular roles and teams to adapt to the rise of new forms of automation.
