Meta announces several new tools and services, powered by artificial intelligence, to help advertisers efficiently build ads and improve campaign results.

At an event in New York, Meta unveiled the AI Sandbox, which it called a testing playground for advertisers to use as they try out new generative AI-powered ad tools.

It’s Meta’s latest effort to show investors and advertisers that hefty investments in the red hot AI space are paying off as the company reckons with slowing ad growth and a costly transition to the metaverse.

Finance chief Susan Li says, “The Company’s capital expenditure for the year will be between $30 billion and $33 billion, an outlook that reflects our ongoing build-out of AI capacity to support ads, Feed and Reels, along with an increased investment in capacity for our generative AI initiatives.”

Meta says that it’s been working with a small group of advertisers on three AI Sandbox tools so far: text variation, background generation and image outcropping.

Text variation generates several versions of an advertiser’s copy, giving it the option to choose which might work best for certain audiences. The background generation tool also relies on text, using inputs to create images that advertisers can use as the background of their material.

In a prepared demo, Meta showed how prompts such as NYC street blurred and snow mountain blurred abstract high quality would generate the corresponding background image behind a product.

With image outcropping, advertisers are able to automatically adapt images to be the correct size across Meta’s platforms. If an advertiser wants to post on Instagram’s main feed as well as Stories and Reels, for example, it will only have to adjust one image for all three.