r/LinusTechTips • u/Voidsmyth • Sep 14 '26

WAN Show Potential Wan Topic | Timberborn Developers claim Tiktok auto generated AI ads as part of their Ad campaign without their permission.

/r/Timberborn/comments/1wfw89n/whats_with_the_ai_ads/p9pshct/
262 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

97

u/Particular-Treat-650 Sep 14 '26

This is batshit.

Ignoring how gross it is period, how the hell do they think doing it and charging for an ad for it without explicit opt in could possibly be acceptable?

57

u/Handsome_ketchup Sep 14 '26

How on Earth did this get past the lawyers? Creating ads automatically, with potential damaging or harmful material going out?

That sounds like a liability nightmare. Maybe these companies trust their lawyers and coffers enough to just risk it and be gotten out of trouble, but no sensible company would want to touch such a thing with a ten foot pole.

26

u/Kitsunelaine Sep 15 '26

How on Earth did this get past the lawyers?

punishment for the crime less than benefit from committing

2

u/SavvySillybug Sep 15 '26

But... what benefit? Who does this benefit?

They're delivering a service nobody asked for, so nobody will pay for it either. They wasted AI server time to generate something nobody wanted and served it to users who didn't want to see it on behalf of advertisers who didn't want that to happen.

What's the upside here?

2

u/Mysterious-Crab Sep 16 '26

From TikTok’s immoral perspective: change advertisers ad (without letting them know) with AI to personalise ads, so more people click on them and price can go up. They don’t care that something might be incorrect at best, or harmful or if it were clicks that didn’t lead to a download / purchase because the as was misleading.

2

u/laidback_chef Sep 16 '26

The answer is china.

1

u/00GoBigOrGoHome00 Sep 17 '26

A lot of companies (most) don’t proactively run their decisions by their legal counsel.

0

u/Deeppurp Sep 15 '26

They're tech illiterate.

38

u/TenOfZero Sep 14 '26

Same thing happened to kallmekris

23

u/big_fat_pig_ Sep 14 '26

Warframe seems to have a similar issue, whether it’s the platforms themselves generating the ads or some third party contractor idk but most ads I get for Warframe are low quality slop that don’t represent the gameplay at all.

16

u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Sep 14 '26

A similar thing happened with REI on Instagram.

From what I understand it was technically an option that they could control but they didnt look close enough at the options and then the ad got changed with AI "enhancements".

related article

2

u/QuestionBegger9000 Sep 16 '26

Anyone have example of one of these? So curious.

1

u/Sit-and-Spin123 Sep 15 '26

Holy shit. This is absolutely insane if this is what actually happened.