Meta's Muse Image in ads: rights, labels and brand control

Meta's new image model is heading into Ads Manager, and for any brand running Facebook and Instagram ads in the Gulf it raises three questions: what it will do to your ads, whether you can use its images elsewhere, and how your brand stays recognisably yours.

Meta launched Muse Image on 7 July 2026 and said that, in the coming weeks, advertisers and agencies would be able to use it through Advantage+ creative, the set of AI tools inside Ads Manager. Three weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg told investors it would supercharge Meta's new end-to-end creative tools by analysing images, improving on its own work and producing better ad variations from the material advertisers supply. It is the part of the Muse family most likely to reach Gulf advertisers this year, yet as of late September it is not confirmed as live.

The four jobs Meta has described

According to Meta, Muse Image will be used to:

• put new backgrounds around product images;
• produce complete lifestyle variations based on a brand's existing ads;
• turn a brand's video creative into still images;
• restyle rooms using products from a business's catalogue, in Meta AI's shopping mode, for businesses in the US.

So far the evidence is testimonial. Meta shared comments from testers including AG1, Origin USA and the agency Tinuiti, who praised the photorealism, the accuracy of brand details and the way packaging stayed intact. Meta has published no performance figures for Muse-generated ads.

Is it in your account yet?

Meta has not announced that Muse Image has reached Advantage+ creative. As of 21 September there was no launch post on its business news pages, and on 29 July Meta's chief financial officer, Susan Li, was still describing the rollout in the future tense. Ads Manager features often arrive account by account without announcement, so check the image generation options in your own account, but do not accept a claim that your ads are made with Muse unless you can see it.

Several tools already inside Advantage+ creative may or may not run on Muse behind the scenes: background generation, image expansion, image generation, text generation, image touch-up and image animation, as well as generating images from video, which is new this year. Meta has not said which model powers which tool. What Li did say is that adoption of image generation among advertisers more than doubled in the second quarter of 2026.

The rights question most brands miss

This catches people out. Meta's terms for its ad creative AI tools, in force since May 2024, say images made with them may be used on Meta's platforms, and that using or publishing them outside those platforms is not authorised. An image Advantage+ generates for your Instagram ad cannot then go on your website, a billboard or a TV spot. The same terms say:

• The output may not be unique, so a competitor could end up with the same image or one very like it.
• Watermarks and authentication data must stay in place, and the output must not be presented as the work of a person.
• Meta receives a permanent licence to whatever you upload, and checking the output is the advertiser's responsibility alone.

Images made in the Meta AI app come under separate terms, which do not clearly say whether commercial use is allowed. Images made through Meta's developer API, at one US cent each, belong to the developer under those terms, although they are not unique either. When you need an image you can use everywhere, make it with a tool whose terms allow that, or commission a photographer.

When an ad carries an AI label

• Meta adds an AI info label to ads its tools have changed significantly, for example through background generation or image generation. Resizing and colour correction do not count.
• Where Meta's tools add a photorealistic person, the label sits beside the ad label itself. Otherwise it appears in the About this ad menu, which Meta is redesigning.
• Meta has begun detecting ads made with other companies' AI tools, using industry signals.
• Ads about social issues, elections or politics must disclose realistic AI content themselves, and those that do not are rejected.

Keeping your brand recognisable

Meta's answer to brand safety is a set of controls: a branding section that stores your logos, colours, fonts and tone, previews before anything publishes, and the option to switch generated versions off. It is also testing brand memory, announced at Cannes in June, which learns a brand's identity and tone from its past ads; WPP is the first agency partner and Unilever the first client. A creative approval workflow is in testing too. Meta has not said whether either runs on Muse.

Watch these settings. In December 2025, Business Insider reported that Meta had swapped an apparel brand's best-performing ad for an AI-generated image of an elderly woman, and that advertisers had found generation settings switched back on after turning them off. In April 2026, agency leaders told Marketing Brew that finding automatically enabled features felt like a game of whack-a-mole. Meta itself says previews do not show every variation that may run.

A sensible AI policy for your brand

In-house or through an agency, agree ground rules before generated images appear.

• Put in writing which AI features may run on your ads, and check every new ad set for features switched on by default.
• Keep AI-generated ad images on Meta. Do not reuse them on your website, outdoors or in print.
• Keep product photography real. A generated background is one thing; a generated product is a misrepresentation waiting to happen.
• Do not generate people for regulated categories, and take extra care with political and social issue ads.
• Check any Arabic text in an image. Meta has not said Muse renders Arabic, and Arabic was not among the new languages for translating text on images.
• Keep a record of what was generated, and for which campaign, in case a complaint comes in.

And Muse Video?

Meta previewed Muse Video alongside Muse Image, saying it generates video with sound but still struggles to sync audio and to handle fast motion. It has not launched, and Meta has said nothing about it in ads. Meta's existing video generation tools are already a big business: Meta said they reached an annual revenue run rate of 10 billion dollars at the end of 2025, and that advertisers using them saw conversion rates more than 3 percent higher in tests.

Whichever tool makes an image, mock it up in every Meta placement before it reaches the auction, to see whether text is cut off or a detail is lost.

ALXO works with both AI-generated content and real photography, so if you are deciding where each belongs in your Meta advertising, we would be glad to talk it through with you.