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Shortly after ChatGPT hit the market last year and instantly captured headlines for its ability to appear human in answering user queries, digital marketing veteran Shane Rasnak began experimenting.

As someone who had built a career in creating online ad campaigns for clients, Rasnak saw how generative artificial intelligence could transform his industry. Whether it was coming up with headlines for Facebook ads or short blurbs of ad copy, Rasnak said, jobs that would have taken him 30 minutes to an hour are now 15-minute projects.

And that’s just the beginning.

Rasnak is also playing with generative AI tools such as Midjourney, which turns text-based prompts into images, as he tries to dream up compelling visuals to accompany Facebook ads. The software is particularly handy for someone without a graphic design background, Rasnak said, and can help alongside popular graphic-editing tools from Canva and Adobe’s Photoshop.

While it’s all still brand new, Rasnak said generative AI is “like the advent of social media” in terms of its impact on the digital ad industry. Facebook and Twitter made it possible for advertisers to target consumers based on their likes, friends and interests, and generative AI now gives them the ability to create tailored messaging and visuals in building and polishing campaigns.

“In terms of how we market our work, the output, the quality and the volume that they’re able to put out, and how personalized you can get as a result of that, that just completely changes everything,” Rasnak said.

Rasnak is far from alone on the hype train.

Meta, Alphabet and Amazon, the leaders in online advertising, are all betting generative AI will eventually be core to their businesses. They’ve each recently debuted products or announced plans to develop various tools to help companies more easily create messages, images and even videos for their respective platforms.

Generative A.I. startups are driving VC deals

Their products are mostly still in trial phases and, in some cases, have been criticized for being rushed to market, but ad experts told CNBC that, taken as a whole, generative AI represents the next logical step in targeted online advertising.

“This is going to have a seismic impact on digital advertising,” said Cristina Lawrence, executive vice president of consumer and content experience at Razorfish, a digital marketing agency that’s part of the ad giant Publicis Groupe.

In May, Meta announced its AI Sandbox testing suite for companies to more easily use generative AI software to create background images and experiment with different advertising copy. The company also introduced updates to its Meta Advantage service, which uses machine learning to improve the efficiency of ads running on its various social apps.

Meta has been pitching the Advantage suite as a way for companies to get better performance from their campaigns after Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update limited their ability to track users across the internet.

‘Personalization at scale’

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Georgetown University in Washington, Oct. 17, 2019.

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Varos CEO Yarden Shaked said the increase shows Facebook is having some success in persuading advertisers to rely on its automated ad technology. However, Shaked said he’s “not sold on the creative piece yet,” regarding Meta’s nascent foray into providing generative AI tools for advertisers.

Similarly, Rasnak said Midjourney’s tool isn’t “quite there yet” when it comes to producing realistic imagery that could be incorporated into an online ad, but is effective at generating “cartoony designs” that resonate with some smaller clients.

Jay Pattisall, an analyst at Forrester, said several major hurdles prevent generative AI from having a major immediate impact on the online ad industry.

One is brand safety. Companies are uncomfortable outsourcing campaigns to generative AI, which can generate visuals and phrases that reflect certain biases or are otherwise offensive and can be inaccurate.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg News found that AI-created imagery from the popular Stable Diffusion tool produced visuals that reflected a number of stereotypes, generating images of people with darker skin tones when fed prompts such as “fast-food worker” or “social worker” and associating lighter skin tones with high-paying jobs.

There are also potential legal issues when it comes to using generative AI powered by models trained on data that’s “scraped from the internet,” Pattisall said. Reddit, Twitter and Stack Overflow have said they will charge AI companies for use of the mounds of data on their platforms.

Scott McKelvey, a longtime marketing writer and consultant, cited other limitations surrounding the quality of the output. Based on his limited experience with ChatGPT, the AI chatbot created by OpenAI, McKelvey said the technology fails to produce the kind of long-form content that companies could find useful as promotional copy.

“It can provide fairly generic content, pulling from information that’s already out there,” McKelvey said. “But there’s no distinctive voice or point of view, and while some tools claim to be able to learn your brand voice based on your prompts and your inputs, I haven’t seen that yet.”

An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Meta said in an email that the company has done extensive research to try to mitigate bias in its AI systems. Additionally, the company said it has brand-safety tools intended to give advertisers more control over where their ads appear online and it will remove any AI-generated content that’s in violation of its rules.

“We are actively monitoring any new trends in AI-generated content,” the email said. “If the substance of the content, regardless of its creation mechanism, violates our Community Standards or Ads Standards, we remove the content. We are in the process of reviewing our public-facing policies to ensure that this standard is clear.”

The Meta spokesperson added that as new chatbots and other automated tools come to market, “the industry will need to find ways to meet novel challenges for responsible deployment of AI in production” and “Meta intends to remain at the forefront of that work.”

Stacy Reed, an online advertising and Facebook ads consultant, is currently incorporating generative AI into her daily work. She’s using the software to come up with variations of Facebook advertising headlines and short copy, and said it’s been helpful in a world where it’s more difficult to track users online.

Reed described generative AI as a good “starting point,” but said companies and marketers still need to hone their own brand messaging strategy and not rely on generic content. Generative AI doesn’t “think” like a human strategist when producing content and often relies on a series of prompts to refine the text, she explained.  

Thus, companies shouldn’t simply rely on the technology to do the big picture thinking of knowing what themes resonate with different audiences or how to execute major campaigns across multiple platforms.

“I’m dealing with large brands that are struggling, because they’ve been so disconnected from the average customer that they’re no longer speaking their language,” Reed said.

For now, major ad agencies and big companies are using generative AI mostly for pilot projects while waiting for the technology to develop, industry experts said.

Earlier this year, Mint Mobile aired an ad featuring actor and co-owner Ryan Reynolds reading a script that he said was generated from ChatGPT. He asked the program to write the ad in his voice and use a joke, a curse word and to let the audience know that the promotion is still going.

After reading the AI-created text, Reynolds said, “That is mildly terrifying, but compelling.”

Watch: Social media showdown: Instagram to launch direct competitor to Twitter

Social media showdown: Instagram to launch direct competitor to Twitter

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Oracle stock jumps after $30 billion annual cloud deal revealed in filing

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Oracle stock jumps after  billion annual cloud deal revealed in filing

Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.

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Oracle shares jumped more than 5% after a recent filing showed a cloud deal that would add over $30 billion annually.

CEO Safra Catz is slated to share the deal news at a company meeting Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The revenues are expected to start hitting in the 2028 fiscal year.

“Oracle is off to a strong start in FY26,” Catz is expected to say, according to the filing. “Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28.”

The deals revealed Monday by Catz will not affect the company’s 2026 guidance, according to the filing.

Read more CNBC tech news

Oracle shares hit record high

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Trump says he has group of ‘very wealthy people’ ready to buy TikTok

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Trump says he has group of ‘very wealthy people’ ready to buy TikTok

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on April 4 that he would again postpone enforcement of a law banning TikTok unless its Chinese owner ByteDance divests from the platform.

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U.S. President Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview aired on Sunday that he has a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy TikTok, whose identities he can reveal in about two weeks.

Trump added that the deal will probably need Beijing’s approval to move forward, but said “I think President Xi will probably do it,” in reference to China’s leader Xi Jinping.

The president made the off-the-cuff remarks while discussing the possibility of another pause of his “reciprocal” tariffs on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.” 

Tiktok’s fate in the U.S. has been in doubt since the approval of a law in 2024 that sought to ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it. The legislation was driven by concerns that the Chinese government could manipulate content and access sensitive data from American users.

Earlier this month, Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest from the platform’s U.S. business. It was his third extension since the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok law just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration in January. The new deadline is Sept. 17. 

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, of PAFACA, had originally been set to take effect on Jan. 19, after which app store operators and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.

TikTok went dark in the U.S. ahead of the original deadline, but was restored after Trump provided it with assurances on the extension.

Trump, who credited the app with boosting his support among young voters in the last presidential election, has maintained that he would like to see the platform stay afloat under new ownership. 

Potential buyers that have voiced interest in the app include Trump insiders such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison to firms like AppLovin and Perplexity AI

Most of the potential bidders for TikTok don't fit both Washington and Beijing's requirements

However, it’s unclear if ByteDance would be willing to sell the company. Any potential divestiture is likely to require approval from the Chinese government.

A deal that would have spun off TikTok’s U.S. operations and allowed ByteDance to retain a minority position had been in the works in April, but was derailed by the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China, Reuters reported that month.

The president previously floated a proposal for American stakeholders to buy the company and then sell a 50% stake to the U.S. government as part of a joint venture

Experts have previously told CNBC that any potential deal could face legal challenges in the U.S., depending on whether it complies with PAFACA.

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Nvidia insiders dump more than $1 billion in stock, according to report

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Nvidia insiders dump more than  billion in stock, according to report

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

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Insiders at artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia have dumped more than $1 billion in stock over the last year, according to a report from the Financial Times.

About $500 million worth of sales occurred over the last month as the market notched new highs and shook off geopolitical tensions that had rattled investors, according to the report. The stock is up more than 17% this year despite concerns over curbs limiting AI chip sales overseas and 44% over the last three months.

Securities filings revealed that the tech titan recently unloaded about $15 million worth of shares as part of his more than $900 million plan announced in March to sell up to 6 million shares through the end of the year. Huang’s net worth totals about $138 billion, placing him as 11th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Last week, the chipmaking giant hit a fresh record and rallied for five straight days following the stock sales and an annual shareholder meeting, where the CEO called robotics the biggest opportunity for the company after AI. That helped the chipmaker regain its seat as the most valuable company ahead Microsoft and Apple.

The FT article cited a report from VerityData, which noted that the jump in shares above $150 prompted the stock dump.

Last year, Huang unloaded more than $700 million in Nvidia shares as part of a prearranged plan.

A Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Read the complete Financial Times report here.

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