Google has issued in recent weeks has been promoting generative AI tools that can summarize search results for users, help them draft essays, and swap cloudy skies for sunshine in otherwise perfect family photos. Today it shows what similar tools can do for its core business: selling ads.
New generative AI systems for advertising clients will compose text on the fly to play out what a person is looking for, and they will 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 global excitement about generative AI.
As the world’s top seller of online revenue-based advertising, Google has been using AI programs for years to help customers target users and help them design ads, such as automatically resizing images. Now, with more powerful AI models capable of tasks such as generating photo-realistic images, it hopes to show that its advertising business, which accounts for 80 percent of its total revenue, can also be more attractive to advertisers.
Google’s recent onslaught of AI-related announcements has rallied shares of its parent company, Alphabet, suggesting fears have eased over the advent of ChatGPT-like web search crippling Google’s search and advertising business.
Google is offering the new features to advertisers for free, but they could increase their revenue if AI-generated text and images encourage businesses to run more ads or get more clicks from consumers. Google’s dominant role in online advertising sales means the industry could be among the first to integrate generative AI into their workflows at scale. “We can deliver more relevant, beautiful ads to users, give advertisers more creative freedom and better performance,” said Jerry Dischler, the vice president overseeing Google Ads. He declined to discuss specific financial prospects for generative AI in advertising.
As anyone who has experimented with an AI chatbot or image generator knows, their output can be unpredictable and even distasteful. And they have expressed 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 the new features, some of which are already available to advertisers in beta form. Google is launching some of them more broadly than its biggest rival, Meta, which announced earlier this month that it was initially inviting selected advertisers to try its own generative AI features.
Providing generative AI in advertising is likely to be expensive, as the computing costs of operating text and image-generating models are sky-high. At a conference last week, Meta AI director Aparna Ramani said that generating an output from those types of models is 1,000 times more expensive than using AI to recommend content and manage users’ news feeds.
One of Google’s new features now adjusts the text of English-language search ads based on what a person has typed into the company’s search box and Google’s information about the advertiser. Previously, every time a person searched, algorithms had to select text to display from a collection that an advertiser had manually pre-written.
