By: Mason Mattu, Section Editor
Does SFU have a pool in convocation mall? Or a parking lot that allows cars to park inside the pool? Those are the kinds of images that Aidan Ramage, a student at the SFU Beedie School of Business, saw via an official SFU advertisement on TikTok.
Ramage told The Peak, “I felt a bit betrayed; we have a beautiful campus and have hundreds of artists enrolled full-time at SFU. Choosing to circumvent available resources in favour of artificial intelligence (AI) is disgusting to see from such a big institution.”
“The university did not approve the ad, which used generative AI to fill in areas above and below a video frame,” SFU told The Peak. “Once SFU was aware of the ad, it was immediately pulled. Our team is working to ensure that it will not happen again.”
TikTok offers various advertising tools. Smart+ campaigns involve AI-driven analytics, and with an add-on called Symphony, businesses can generate parts of the advertisement using AI. However, TikTok’s advertising guide describes Spark Ads as a campaign option with manual control.
The university denied enabling any of TikTok’s AI creative tools in their ad suite on their end, opting to use a “Spark” manual campaign without any “automated creative optimization features” enabled. There is no mention of these AI tools on TikTok’s page on Spark Ads.
According to the platform’s advertisement policies, any ad content that is “inaccurate, misleading, or false” is banned from the platform. The SFU advertisement is misleading because there is no pool within convocation mall.
A representative from ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, refused to speak on the record with The Peak, instead asking to be put in contact with SFU to work on fixing any technological problems. The Peak followed up with SFU, who stated that “the university is no longer using the previous ad format, which caused TikTok’s AI features to alter our original assets without our knowledge. Due to the platform’s popularity with potential student audiences, we continue to run ads on TikTok but have switched to a new ad format that prevents AI optimization.”
“There was no indicator from TikTok that the ad included AI-generated content,” Beedie student Aidan Ramage said. “This is another thing that confused me, as normally, videos and ads on TikTok indicate when content has any traces of AI-generation.”
This is not the first time that users of TikTok’s advertising suite have complained about unauthorized AI additions to their advertisements.
Video game company Finji recently criticized TikTok for adding unauthorized “racist and sexualized” AI changes to a character in an advertisement.
They were also unable to make changes to these variations. Like SFU, the company claimed they had AI “all the way turned off” in the ad suite. According to reporting by IGN, a customer service representative from TikTok confirmed that Finji’s AI tools were indeed turned off.
One user on the r/TikTokAds subreddit also complained about unauthorized additions to their manual ad campaign. “I have NOT activated smart creative on my campaign, yet it seems to be on. When I watch my own ad, AI-generated changes have been made like changing the music and adding animations or AI stock images.”
This is the second time the university has found itself in a controversy regarding AI-generated promotional material. Recently, the SFU Bookstore was accused of using AI-generated art.
