• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 19, 2025

Google Ads has rolled out the ability to use text prompts to generate images that contain adult people and faces across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display and Apps campaigns, along with other artificial intelligence (AI)-driven lifestyle images.

These tools have become the backbone of connections between advertisers and prospective customers. 

The creative updates include the generative AI (GAI) capabilities that allow advertisers to generate images of adult people, asset audience recommendations, and asset testing for feed-only Performance Max campaigns.

The features also were built with safeguards to prevent deepfakes and sexually explicit materials. All generated images are tagged with SynthID to provide transparency into which images were generated using AI. 

Any ad generated by AI must go through the exact same checks as any other ad, a Google spokesperson told MediaPost via email.

"If it violates our policies it is subject to the exact same enforcement actions," the spokesperson said. "Our systems are already designed to do this at scale regardless of how the content is generated."

Filters have been put in place to block branded, obscene, and harmful content from being generated. In recent years, Google has invested significantly in expanding its misrepresentation policy to address unreliable claims and misinformation within the ads ecosystem.

"As part of our misrepresentation policy we prohibit the use of manipulated media, deepfakes and other forms of doctored content meant to deceive, defraud, or mislead users," the spokesperson said.

The variety of updates that rolled out Tuesday are designed to build deeper connections with an advertiser’s audience through compelling and effective campaigns. AI can reason and determine what will appeal most to specific consumers as the ad industry moves toward one-to-one dynamic personalization. 

By helping to scale and improve the variety of assets available to advertisers, asset-audience recommendations can generate new ideas for images by showing themes and elements that resonate with their top audiences like “nature” and “ocean” scenes. 

Investments in Performance Max now let advertisers test the impact of different changes and optimizations. Advertisers can test the uplift of adding Performance Max campaigns to your existing campaign mix.

Last year, Google added experiments that enable advertisers to test changes within their Performance Max campaigns, such as the impact of using final URL expansion. Now, Google has introduced a beta for retailers that have campaigns with product feeds, but haven’t uploaded additional creative assets.

This allows advertisers to compare the impact of adding text, image and video assets to campaigns -- including assets built with GAI, against control configuration with no assets. The project is running in beta.