Meta's AI Turned a Bike into a Two-Handlebar Nightmare. It's Doing It to Your Ads Too.
There is a bike out there with two sets of handlebars. No one made it on purpose. No one approved it. A major outdoor retailer ran it in a paid Instagram ad, and the internet noticed before anyone on the marketing team did.
The bike belonged to REI, one of the biggest outdoor retailers in the US. The original photo came from a professional shoot by cycling brand Van Rysel, featuring a real athlete, proper equipment, normal number of handlebars. When REI ran the ad, though, what went live showed a woman standing next to a bicycle that looked like it had been designed by someone with a fundamental misunderstanding of how bikes work.
REI's response once it worked out what had happened? A statement to Business Insider: "Meta auto-enrolled us in an AI personalisation tool that produced an inaccurate and inappropriate alteration of a vendor-provided image in some of our ads. While a two-handled bike might be interesting, it is not something you will find in our assortment."
That last sentence is doing a lot of work.
The Tool Nobody Asked For
Here is the part that should make you stop and check your Meta Ads Manager right now.
REI didn't opt into this. Meta switched it on for them. No announcement. No permission. Just a toggle that flipped on somewhere in the system, and suddenly a vendor's carefully shot product image had been "improved" by an algorithm that clearly doesn't know what a handlebar is.
The tool sits inside Meta's Advantage+ suite, a growing collection of AI features that automate targeting, creative decisions, placements, and budget allocation. Meta has been expanding Advantage+ throughout 2024 and 2025, and it's now the default setup for sales, leads, and app campaigns. Features that were once optional toggles have been switched on, one by one.
And here's the thing: it's not just bugs doing this. One media agency exec told Business Insider that a bug auto-toggling AI creative settings had hit most of the 15 clients her firm handles on Meta. She'd flagged it to her Meta rep multiple times. Most of those advertisers had no idea it had happened.
The Valentine's Day Ad That Made Everyone Look Like an AI Spammer
REI's a big brand. They weathered it. The internet got a chuckle. Life moved on.
But the same thing happened to Quite Literally Books, a small bookshop. Their photographer Abigail Hogue spent proper time shooting a Valentine's Day campaign: chocolates, macarons, candles, books. Good work. She uploaded it to Meta, it got approved, and then it started running.
About 12 hours later, friends started sending her screenshots.
"I started getting messages from friends and people I knew and screenshots of some of these ads that were running, cheekily accusing me of AI slop," she told Business Insider.
The text on the products was garbled. The products themselves looked like "knockoff iterations" of the things she'd actually photographed. The careful creative she'd put together was now something that looked like it'd been generated by someone who'd never seen a chocolate.
She went in and turned everything off. Then she spent hours on the phone with Meta customer service. They told her it was a "sporadic" occurrence. Then a "one-off." Then a "glitch." She asked for a refund. Meta said it'd look into it. As of the Business Insider report, nothing had arrived.
Meanwhile, over 8 million advertisers are now using at least one of Meta's generative AI creative tools. Most of them didn't specifically choose to.
What Meta's Fine Print Actually Says
Here's the bit that should concern anyone running paid advertising on Facebook or Instagram.
Meta's terms for its generative AI ad tools state that outputs may be "inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, offensive, and/or inappropriate." And the advertiser is responsible for reviewing them before the ads run.
So Meta auto-enrolls you in a tool that can produce nonsensical images of your products. The ads go live. People see them. And if something goes wrong, it's on you, because it says so in the terms.
This isn't a legal lecture. It's just how it works. The platforms are opt-out by default, not opt-in. They can change your creative without asking. And the responsibility for what runs in your ads sits with you, full stop.
Why This Is Bigger Than a Funny Bike
The REI story went viral because a double-handlebar bike is sort of objectively hilarious. But the actual problem isn't the bike.
It's that most small business owners running Meta ads have no idea which AI features are currently active on their account. The settings are buried. They change. Bugs re-toggle things. And while a big brand like REI has a PR team and vendor relationships to manage, a small business on a £500/month ad budget doesn't have that same cushion.
If your ad runs with garbled text or AI-generated creative that looks nothing like your brand, the people who see it don't know Meta did it. They think you did. That reflects on your business, not the platform.
Robert Webster, CEO of TAU Marketing, which manages around $500 million in annual ad spend, said it plainly: "When the AI starts generating weird creative or making unapproved changes, it can damage brand perception, especially for anyone who cares about consistency."
Three Things to Do This Week
You don't need to panic. You do need to check.
1. Audit your Meta Ads Manager AI settings. Go into your active campaigns and look for anything under Advantage+ Creative. Check whether "Automatic Adjustments," "Test New Creative Features," or any image generation setting is toggled on. If you didn't turn them on yourself, turn them off. Meta's been known to re-enable these settings after platform updates, so this is worth checking regularly, not just once.
2. Review your running ads before they go live. If you're using any automation in your ad setup, check the actual creative that's running, not just the assets you uploaded. AI-altered images don't always look obviously wrong at a glance, and by the time your friends are sending you screenshots, the ad has already been seen.
3. Build a human review step into your ad workflow. If you use an agency, make sure there's a review step that checks for AI creative alterations before ads go live. As the Mediassociates experience shows, even experienced agencies get caught out by this. Regularly.
The platforms are moving fast. The defaults are increasingly AI. The responsibility stays with you, as well.
This isn't a reason to stop running ads. It's a reason to know what your ad tools are actually doing.
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Sources:
- Business Insider, "REI Faces Backlash for AI Instagram Ad and Blames a Meta AI Tool," June 24, 2026. https://www.businessinsider.com/rei-backlash-ai-ad-instagram-blamed-meta-ai-tool-2026-6
- Business Insider, "Meta's AI Ads Push Causes Chaos for Brands," July 13, 2026. https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-ai-ads-push-causes-chaos-for-brands-2026-7
- PPC Land, "REI's AI Bike Ad Fiasco Reveals a Meta Auto-Enrollment Setting Brands Missed," June 26, 2026. https://ppc.land/reis-ai-bike-ad-fiasco-reveals-a-meta-auto-enrollment-setting-brands-missed/
- The Verge, "Two Handlebars Are Better Than One, Right?", June 25, 2026. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/956661/two-handlebars-are-better-than-one-right
- MediaPost, "Meta To Integrate 'Reasoning' Image-Generation Tool Into AI Ad Suite," July 8, 2026. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/416400/meta-to-integrate-reasoning-image-generation-too.html
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About Steven Tann: Steven helps business owners build systems that run themselves using AI. After 10+ years helping 7,000+ businesses and building his own autonomous operations, he's the bloke who actually does it, not just talks about it. Find out more at steventann.com.