Meta Says You’re ‘Solely Responsible’ for What Its AI Does to Your Ads. Check What It’s Changing Before November 20

In June, REI found itself being mocked on Reddit over an Instagram ad that showed a bike with two sets of handlebars. The photo behind it was real, but one of Meta’s AI tools had reworked it. REI said Meta had “auto-enrolled us in an AI personalization tool that produced an inaccurate and inappropriate alteration.” The company switched the tool off and apologized, adding that “while a two-handled bike might be interesting, it is not something you will find in our assortment.” It was a funny story at the time. Meta’s new advertising terms make it a lot less funny. Meta’s revised Commercial Terms add a section on AI features. It covers features that “optimize, enhance or create” an advertiser’s content, warns that they “may make mistakes and may not always produce accurate, complete, or suitable results,” and says that businesses are “solely responsible for and assume[s] any and all risks associated with such AI features and any resulting Content.” According to Adweek, the earlier wording put that responsibility on advertisers only when they chose to use Meta’s AI tools, and the new section doesn’t appear to depend on that choice. A Meta spokesperson told Adweek that advertisers can switch off individual Advantage+ features in Ads Manager at any time, but didn’t say whether a business is liable for a feature it never switched on. Nobody has to sign anything, either. Carrying on using Meta’s products after the terms take effect counts as accepting them. That was due to happen on October 30, but on October 23 Meta told Reuters it was extending the date to November 20, and its terms page now shows the new date. The delay followed regulatory complaints about a separate clause on crawling websites; the AI section hasn’t changed. Why this matters more than it sounds For years, most of the automation in advertising sat on the delivery side, helping decide where and when an ad ran, while the business kept a much firmer hand on what the ad actually said. Generative AI is blurring that line, because the platform can now change the ad itself, adding links, translating headlines, generating new images from your product photos, and spinning your copy into variations you never saw. Agencies told Adweek that this is already happening in live campaigns. Ryan Adams, a paid search and social specialist at the agency Exverus, said his team had pulled running ads to strip out sitelinks, translations and AI images that had made it past several quality checks, because “Meta auto-applies the enhancements, and many of the options are tucked away in hidden or collapsed menus.” So the platform’s tools are doing more of the writing, often by default, at the same moment its contract spells out that the result belongs to you. Your customers will never read Meta’s terms, and they’ll assume anything in your ad is something you chose to say. Marketing leaders already sense the risk. In a recent Forrester survey of U.S. consumer-brand marketing executives, 64 percent said their use of AI was likely to produce a brand-damaging incident within the next 12 months, and Forrester points to Starbucks’s failed AI-driven campaign in South Korea as the kind of incident that won’t stay isolated. For a B2B company, the danger is less about a strange-looking bicycle and more about claims. A translated headline that overstates what your product does, a generated image showing a feature you don’t sell, or a link that sends a prospect to the wrong page is a compliance problem as much as a creative one. Google is moving in the same direction. From December 4, new Performance Max campaigns will have image extraction switched on by default, pulling images from your landing pages to use in ads, even where you’d turned that off for the whole account. Google isn’t generating new pictures there, but it is choosing which of your images appear in an ad, and a setting you chose for the account months ago won’t decide it for your next campaign. I don’t think the answer is to switch everything off. Some of these features really do improve results, and for a small team, automated variations can be the difference between testing one ad and testing 10. The problem starts when nobody in the business can say which features are on, or who decided to turn them on. What to do before November 20 Find out what’s actually switched on. Ask whoever runs your Meta advertising, whether that’s your own team or an agency, to list every Advantage+ creative enhancement enabled in each live campaign, including sitelinks, translations, image generation, and text variations. Turn off anything nobody has made a deliberate decision to use, and take dated screenshots of the settings so you have a record of what you approved. Check what’s serving as well as what you uploaded. The edit you most need to catch is the one that happens after launch. Set up a weekly look at the versions people are actually seeing, including other languages and placements, and compare them with what you approved. Bring AI ad changes into your approval process. If legal or compliance signs off on ad copy before it runs, they should also know which tools can change that copy afterward and who in the business has the authority to switch them on. Give whoever reviews the live ads the authority to pause one that’s wrong, and a quick route to someone who knows whether a product claim is accurate. Businesses have long leaned on the platforms to find the audience while keeping control of the ad itself. The platforms now want to help write the ad as well, which can be genuinely useful, but their contracts make it clear that the accountability isn’t moving with the work. The businesses that come through this well will be the ones that can say exactly what these tools are allowed to change in their ads, and show the record to prove it. EXPERT OPINION BY ROBERT GILLESPIE, AI MARKETING EXPERT

AI is exposing how fragile the web really is. What you can do to stay safe

The vulnerabilities were around for years — more than a decade — but researchers were only able to understand how hackers could take advantage of them with the help of AI. The vulnerability, called P2PShell, impacts a coding language that powers 70% of the world’s websites, enabling hackers to remotely execute code or gain access to information stored on servers. That sent websites into a scramble to update their systems, with some government websites in Europe going offline temporarily this past week until they could install the fix. The discovery is yet another reminder of the fragile infrastructure of the internet. And with AI supercharging the abilities of both researchers and bad actors to discover flaws, it likely won’t be the last time a discovery like this is made. “A lot of the internet and a lot of global IT infrastructure runs on technology that’s quite old, or is based on things that are very old in terms of computers, and likely have similar vulnerabilities,” said Patrick Fussell, IBM’s global head of adversary simulation. With a vulnerability like P2PShell, there isn’t much that users can do to protect themselves. It’s up to organizations, businesses and governments to update their services with the latest security patches. But it does underscore the importance of being smart about your digital habits. The age-old advice of keeping your passwords secure and being wary of suspicious emails is more important than ever as hackers gain more sophisticated tools and use AI to find more of the internet’s weak points. Update your software Don’t ignore those software update notifications on your laptop or phone. Many of these updates include critical security fixes, and installing them as quickly as possible shortens the amount of time hackers have to take advantage of bugs. “Users still need to do their parts in terms of installing those updates and maintaining a good security hygiene to put them in a slightly better position,” said Gang Wang, associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois. Most smartphones now support software updates for roughly seven years following their release. If you have an older phone, you should check if it’s still compatible with new software versions. You can find information about software compatibility on Apple, Google and Samsung’s websites. Watch out for phishing attacks Pay attention to the URLs of websites you’re visiting and links you’re clicking, especially if you’ve received the link in an email or text claiming to be your bank or credit card company. Never share personal data, email addresses, passwords, banking information or credit card numbers unless you’re certain the website is legitimate. AI has enabled attackers to create sophisticated phishing attacks that are more difficult to spot and may lack the key red flags of a scam. “The traditional way of determining a phishing attack was, ‘Hey, it didn’t sound right. It used wrong language. It had spelling errors, grammar errors,’” Jud Dressler, head of the risk operations center at cyber insurance firm Resilience, previously told CNN. “All of that stuff, the AI is going to take care of that.” AI can also help attackers conduct deeper research on potential targets to create more personalized and convincing messages, Dressler added. The best way to avoid phishing scams is to log into your account or call the company or person you’ve received a suspicious message from, rather than clicking links. Also, remember that smaller businesses may be slower to patch their systems in the event of an attack or data breach compared to large companies. Brush up on your passwords Never reuse passwords. Instead, try a password manager that creates long, unique passwords for all your online accounts. Simply put: Computers are better than humans at making passwords that are hard to guess. “We know humans, when they make decisions, they tend to make the same decisions as other people,” Rachel Tobac, CEO of cybersecurity and training company SocialProof Security, told CNN’s Terms of Service podcast with Clare Duffy in 2024. “So, you know, they make a password for their work. It has the work’s name in it. It’s got a capital letter in the first position to satisfy the capitalization requirement.” Tobac recommended password managers like Bitwarden, 1Password and Dashlane. The most important thing to look for is whether a password manager offers encryption, which keeps your passwords safe and unreadable to hackers. Other tips for staying safe online Use passkeys instead of passwords: Passkeys are digital credentials that let you sign into online services using your fingerprint, face scan or PIN instead of a typed password. Passkeys are generally thought to be more secure than passwords since they’re tied to biometric data stored on your device that can’t be as easily stolen or spoofed. Apple, Google and Microsoft’s operating systems all support passkeys. Use two-factor authentication: Enable two-factor verification on any service that offers it. Two-factor authentication sends a login code via text, email or phone call as an extra layer of protection in addition to your password. Some experts prefer app-based code generators like Google Authenticator since text messages can be vulnerable to hackers. Monitor all your important accounts: Keep an eye on all important accounts for suspicious changes. Many offer automatic email or text alerts. Freeze your credit report: Freezing your credit file with the three main agencies — Experian, Transunion and Equifax — is an easy way to prevent nefarious actors from trying to open new accounts in your name. Create a family code word: If you get a suspicious call or message from someone who sounds like a loved one asking for information, call them back yourself, or call people close to them if you can’t get a hold of them. A code word shared between you and your loved ones can confirm their identity. While AI is making it easier for even novice hackers to execute more advanced campaigns, bad actors are still trying to take advantage of humans at the end of the day. “It’s still kind of a familiar attack method,” said Dressler. “It’s just using essentially AI to make it more believable and more effective.” By Lisa Eadicicco, Hadas Gold

72 Percent of Executives Say Companies Aren’t Really Transforming Work With AI. It Shows Why Increasing Productivity Isn’t Enough

Companies are using AI to help employees accomplish more. New research suggests the bigger opportunity is changing what organizations can accomplish together. Companies are investing billions in artificial intelligence to make employees more productive. Reports can be written faster, information can be analyzed in seconds, and routine administrative work can be automated. By conventional measures, those improvements represent progress. But new research from SAP SuccessFactors suggests that many organizations may be pursuing the wrong objective. They are becoming better at completing existing work without fundamentally reconsidering how that work creates value. The research published October 7 by SAP’s Future of Work Research Lab draws on global research involving 2,718 employees, 500 C-suite leaders, and 60 HR executives, among other sources. One finding is particularly revealing: 72 percent of C-suite leaders believe that most organizations claiming to transform work with AI are actually automating existing jobs faster. That distinction exposes a problem. An organization can become more productive without becoming more effective. Productivity and performance are different things Productivity measures the relationship between inputs and outputs. How many reports can an analyst produce? How many customer inquiries can an employee resolve? How many hours can a company eliminate from an administrative process? These are useful measures, but they reveal only part of organizational performance. Consider a company that uses AI to double the number of market analyses its employees produce. The productivity improvement is measurable. But if those analyses continue moving through the same approval processes, reaching the same decision makers, and informing the same strategic assumptions, the organization may not become any better at responding to its market. More information does not necessarily produce better decisions. Faster work does not automatically produce greater adaptability. Research from McKinsey reinforces this distinction. Its global study of how organizations are capturing value from AI found that, among 25 organizational practices examined, redesigning workflows had the greatest effect on whether companies reported an earnings impact from generative AI. In other words, the value of technology depends partly on what organizations change around it. SAP’s research points toward a different operating model The SAP researchers identified six shifts that could make work more valuable and engaging. They include moving from static jobs to dynamic roles, from centralized authority to decentralized decisions, and from measuring output to measuring impact. In an experimental study conducted by SAP SuccessFactors researchers, employees reported 77 percent greater perceived autonomy under decentralized decision-making, while dynamic roles were perceived as 49 percent more challenging than static jobs. These findings concern employees’ perceptions of work design, not demonstrated improvements in business performance. Nevertheless, they suggest that changing how work is organized could improve the conditions under which people contribute. When employees have greater authority to make decisions, they can respond to problems without waiting for unnecessary approval. When roles become more flexible, expertise can move across organizational boundaries. When performance is evaluated by impact rather than activity, employees have stronger reasons to concentrate on outcomes that matter. These changes do not simply make existing work faster. They change how an organization functions. AI can increase output without increasing capacity Greater productivity can also create unexpected demands on employees. Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye examined how generative AI changed work habits during an eight-month study at a technology company. In their research published in Harvard Business Review, they found that employees worked faster, assumed additional responsibilities, and extended work into more hours of the day, often voluntarily. AI made more work possible, but that did not necessarily make work more sustainable. The distinction matters because every additional output can create new demands for coordination, review, and decision-making. A company generating twice as many analyses may also create twice as many recommendations for someone to evaluate. SAP’s research identified a related problem. Although 88 percent of employees reported changes to their jobs because of AI, half of those changes occurred without meaningful guidance from managers or their organizations. Employees are adapting to new capabilities while the systems around them remain largely unchanged. Technology increases what individuals can accomplish, but organizational friction can prevent that capability from producing greater value. Measure what the organization can accomplish together Leaders should begin by asking three questions that traditional productivity measures often overlook: Are decisions improving? Does relevant expertise reach decision makers sooner, and can teams respond more effectively to emerging problems? Is coordination improving? Can employees combine their knowledge, share responsibility, and work across functions without unnecessary barriers? Is the organization becoming more adaptable? When customers, technologies, or competitive conditions change, can people reorganize their efforts and respond effectively? These measures are harder to capture than hours saved or tasks completed. They are also closer to what determines sustained organizational performance. The larger opportunity presented by AI is not simply to accelerate individual work. It is to improve the relationships, responsibilities, and decision processes through which people create value together. Making everyone more productive may improve today’s numbers. Making the organization more capable can change tomorrow’s possibilities. EXPERT OPINION BY SCOTT HUTCHESON, AUTHOR, BIOHACKING LEADERSHIP

Websites shut down globally after AI finds cybersecurity flaw affecting 70% of the internet

Governments and companies around the world are racing to fix vulnerabilities revealed by artificial intelligence that could affect 70% of the world’s websites. Some websites and services briefly went dark after the set of vulnerabilities were announced Wednesday. The US National Security Agency and Europe’s cybersecurity agency advised companies to take immediate action to address two critical flaws in PHP, a programming language that powers 70% of the world’s websites. The flaws in PHP were uncovered and addressed by teams at OpenAI, Google-owned cybersecurity company Wiz, and another cybersecurity company, Calif. The underlying flaws had existed for a decade, but exploiting them involved a complex set of steps “at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve,” according to Wiz. Researchers then deployed AI to adapt techniques for taking advantage of those vulnerabilities – known as as “exploits” in cybersecurity – and analyze the results. The bugs, collectively called PHP2Shell, could allow attackers to break into websites and read memory that could contain sensitive information, like passwords. The PHP Foundation, the organization behind the coding language, has released a patch for the bugs, which have been hidden in their software for years, and is urging website operators to update their systems immediately. The CEO of Cloudflare said on X that his company’s network has observed millions of attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities in the past couple of days. “With PHP behind such a vast share of the web, the exposure could reach almost everywhere people spend money online,” said Nigel Green, the CEO of deVere Group, a financial advisory firm. “Booking platforms, marketplaces, subscription services, ticketing sites, delivery apps and utility portals could all be holding card details on systems built with the same kind of code,” he added. ‘AI inflection point’ The vulnerabilities involve an issue with how the PHP language works with a computer’s memory. When a website request unexpectedly ends, PHP could leave data behind in the memory that can be accessed and potentially corrupted or exposed later. The flaws could allow attackers to remotely execute code, disrupt services and expose customer data, according to web infrastructure provider Cloudflare, which has been working with the PHP Foundation, Calif, OpenAI and Wiz to address the issue. “Think of a hotel room where you check out, but your key still works,” Patrick Fussell, global head of adversary simulation at IBM, told CNN. “And so you can just go back into that hotel room later, and now somebody else’s stuff is there.” The bugs were discovered in late August but were disclosed to the public only on Wednesday, after PHP had come up with a fix. AI played a crucial role in identifying and fixing vulnerabilities “that had remained hidden in the PHP codebase for more than a decade,” according to Wiz. The company called PHP the “backbone of the web” and said the episode marks an AI inflection point. “What AI changed was the ability to understand the weaknesses,” Wiz researchers wrote in a blog post Wednesday, and then quickly exploit those weaknesses into a way to attack. “With frontier AI models and the right tools, a single researcher completed in a week what previously would have taken a world-class team months of work,” they added. Researchers at Wiz used Google’s Gemini 4 Argon, Wiz Atlas and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol during the research process. World leaders weigh in Global leaders urged organizations to take action. Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said that his cabinet was “closely monitoring the situation surrounding the vulnerabilities in PHP.” Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said companies should consider suspending services if necessary in order to reduce their exposure. “Please check if your publicly available websites use PHP, and prepare to apply the fix patch that will be released tonight… as soon as possible,” she posted on X Wednesday. Japanese airline ANA, railway operator JR West and the country’s largest bank, MUFG, were among companies that reported some webpages and services temporarily suspended. In Europe, government websites in France, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands, including the Dutch cyber security agency, were temporarily taken offline while security fixes were implemented. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, told CNN Thursday that it was “in the process of addressing security vulnerabilities in PHP,” and that a number of its systems had been taken down as a “precautionary measure.” Nearly three dozen UK government services are unavailable and four are “partially unavailable” while security upgrades take place, UK government minister Elizabeth Lloyd told the House of Lords Thursday. The Journal, Ireland’s second most-popular news outlet, was temporarily offline Thursday morning while it bolstered its “defences,” it said in a notice. A shift in cybersecurity Wiz researchers say the issue is on par with the Heartbleed bug from 2014, which impacted an encryption technology estimated to be used by some two-thirds of the Web. Heartbleed allowed cybercriminals to access data that should have been protected. Like Heartbleed, the researchers at Wiz say PHP2Shell could similarly serve as a turning point in cybersecurity. While the vulnerabilities existed for years, AI made it practical to deploy them. “The speed with which vulnerabilities are being discovered is well beyond what it ever was before,” said Fussell. Even though a patch has been released, it’s likely that not all companies and organizations will update their systems at the same time, according to Gang Wang, associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois. That could give bad actors a window to exploit it now that the vulnerability has been made public – and they can now do so faster using AI. But taking advantage of the vulnerability is no easy task, even with the help of AI, according to Fussell. “This is being touted as like, ‘Hey, you can push a button and basically take over a server type of thing,’” he said. “…To actually pull this off requires a couple of conditions that are actually fairly complex and not always going to work out in favor of somebody who’s trying to go and exploit this bug.” By Lisa Eadicicco, Hanna Ziady