A physical education teacher and former athletic director of a Baltimore County high school has been arrested and charged with using an AI voice cloning service to frame the school’s principal.

The Baltimore Banner reports that Baltimore County police believe a recording that circulated on social media in January with purported audio of Pikesville High School principal Eric Eiswert making racist and antisemitic comments was fake. Experts told The Baltimore Banner and police that the recording, which briefly resulted in Eiswert’s suspension, has a “flat tone, unusually clean background sounds, and lack of consistent breathing sounds or pauses.”

Baltimore County police traced the recording to Dazhon Darien, a former athletic director at the school whose name was also mentioned in the audio clip. He allegedly used school computers “to access OpenAI tools and Microsoft Bing Chat services,” as reported by WBAL-TV 11 and NBC News. He was also linked to the audio’s release via an email address and associated recovery phone number.

It is not clear what AI voice platform Darien allegedly used.

The police arrested Darien on Thursday at the airport and said in a statement, “It’s believed Mr. Darien, who was an Athletic Director at Pikesville High School, made the recording to retaliate against Mr. Eiswert who at the time was pursuing an investigation into the potential mishandling of school funds.” He has been released after posting bail and faces charges including theft (for the issue with school funds), disturbing the operations of a school, retaliation against a witness, and stalking.

Over the past year, interest in AI-powered voice cloning technology has grown as the services get better at sounding more human. But these apps have also gotten people into hot water. The political party of Imran Khan, the jailed former prime minister of Pakistan, used ElevenLabs, a popular commercially available text-to-voice generation platform, to replicate his voice during the campaign. Two Texas companies were linked to a fake robocall pretending to be President Joe Biden telling people not to vote. The Federal Communications Commission banned the use of AI robocalls in February. And of course, the fake Drake used AI to create the song “Heart on My Sleeve.”

In this fraught environment, OpenAI decided in March to withhold its AI text-to-voice generation platform, Voice Engine, from public use. The service, which only requires a 15-minute audio clip to clone someone’s voice, is only available to a limited number of researchers due to the lack of guardrails around the technology.

US lawmakers have filed, but not yet passed, several bills like the No Fakes Act and the No AI Fraud Act that seek to prevent technology companies from using an individual’s face, voice, or name without their permission.

Update, April 25th: Clarified that Pikesville High School is in the city of Pikesville in Baltimore County, Maryland, and added details about Darien and Thursday’s arrest.

Google has spent the past year dealing with two of the biggest threats in its 25-year history: the rise of generative AI and the growing drumbeat of regulation. AI, in particular, has shaken the company to its core: it’s made big search changes, realigned the Search, Android, and hardware teams around AI, and launched its own Gemini AI model to capitalize on the opportunity.

Google execs cut projects and laid off employees to refocus, and yesterday, it announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion share buyback alongside its Q1 2024 earnings.

Investors, at least, are eating it up: Google parent company Alphabet has finally officially hit and maintained a $2 trillion market cap for a whole day of trading after briefly touching $2 trillion in November 2021. Google is the fourth most valuable public company in the world, behind Nvidia ($2.2 trillion), Apple ($2.6 trillion), and Microsoft ($3.0 trillion). Amazon is currently at $1.8 trillion, and Meta is at $1.1 trillion.

Graph: Google

Unlike Meta, whose stock price fell 10 percent after Mark Zuckerberg said it would take years to make money in “massive” bets on generative AI, Google said yesterday that it’s already finding some small ways to sell it — for example, it’s helping advertisers target people with AI in its Performance Max tool and that those advertisers are “63 percent more likely to publish a campaign with good or excellent ad strength.”

The company also says Discover Financial is rolling out AI tools to nearly 10,000 call center agents and that Ikea is seeing an increase in one form of revenue from “value-based bidding solutions.” And while it’s not yet talking about monetizing AI answers in Google Search, CEO Sundar Pichai said, “...we are very confident we can manage the cost of how to serve these queries.”

For now, Google says it doesn’t want to disrupt search too much: “We’re being measured in how we do this, focusing on areas where Gen AI can improve the search experience while also prioritizing traffic to websites and merchants,” said Pichai.

Google’s existing businesses seem to be doing just fine, too: the company made $23.7 billion in profit on $80.5 billion in revenue, according to the Q1 2024 earnings report it released yesterday. Not only is that 15 percent more revenue year over year — it’s 14 percent more profit than it made during the holiday quarter when search and ad revenue were both a bit higher.

And while Google may have cut a thousand-plus employees to help boost those profits, it seems layoffs may have slowed or paused. We reported last quarter that Google spent $700 million on layoffs in January alone, and yet, the new Q1 report shows Google only spent $716 million on “severance and related charges” across January, February, and March.

Q1 search and advertising revenue were each up 14 percent year over year, YouTube ads were up nearly 21 percent, and “subscriptions, platforms, and devices” were up 18 percent year over year — mostly due to premium YouTube subscriptions, said Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler (so not necessarily Pixel 8 sales).

Google said it’s improving its ability to challenge TikTok and Instagram Reels, too, with Schindler talking about how 50 percent more creators are uploading YouTube Shorts shortform videos and how the monetization rate of Shorts has increased 12 percent over the last quarter alone.

Google will host its developer conference, Google I/O, on May 14th.

They brought forests back to life in Costa Rica. Their next challenge? Restoring ecosystems in a warming world.

Ecologist Daniel Janzen wades into the field, clutching a walking stick in one hand and a fist full of towering green blades of grass in the other to steady himself. Winnie Hallwachs, also an ecologist and Janzen’s wife, watches him closely, carrying a hat that she hands to him once he stops to explain our whereabouts.

Together with other conservationists who have dedicated decades of their lives to this place, the couple has brought forests back to the Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). It’s ​​an astonishing 163,000 hectares of protected landscapes — an area larger than the Hawaiian island of Oahu — where forests have reclaimed farmland in Costa Rica.

The grass isn’t supposed to be here. Janzen and Hallwachs only keep this small field around as a reminder of — and to show visitors like me — how far they’ve come since the 1970s, when pastures and ranches still dominated much of the landscape.

Across from the field, on the other side of a two-lane road that winds through the ACG, is one of the first stretches of young forest that Janzen and Hallwachs started nursing back to life. Tree limbs stretch out over the road, as if trying to reach the remaining patch of grass left to seed on the other side.

ACG is a success story, a powerful example of what can happen when humans help forests heal. It’s part of what’s made Costa Rica a destination for ecotourism and the first tropical country in the world to reverse deforestation. But now, the couple’s beloved forest faces a more insidious threat.

Across the road, the leaves are too perfect. It’s like they’re growing in a greenhouse, Janzen says. There’s an eerie absence among the foliage — although you’d probably also have to be a regular in the forest to notice.

“Every year it seems worse,” Hallwachs says. “We should have found bugs.”

There should have been bees, wasps, and moths along our walk, she explains. And plenty of caterpillar “houses” — curled up leaves the critters sew together that eventually become shelter for other insects. “The houses were everywhere, now it’s almost exciting when you see one,” Hallwachs says. “This is just weird.”

The bugs play crucial roles in the forest — from pollinating plants to forming the base of the food chain. Their disappearance is a warning. Climate change has come to the ACG, marking a new, troubling chapter in the park’s comeback story.

It also serves as a lesson for conservation efforts around the globe. More than 190 countries have recently committed to restoring 30 percent of the world’s degraded ecosystems under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Billionaire philanthropists are pledging to support those efforts. What’s happening here in the ACG says a lot about what it takes to revive a forest — especially in a warming world.

“When I was here earlier, a younger person, I could win a case of beer by betting on the first day that the rains would start,” Janzen tells The Verge. Now, at 85 years old, he says, “I would never dream of betting anything because it can start a month early or a month late.”

The dry season is about two months longer than it was when Janzen arrived in the 1960s. Climate change is making seasons more unpredictable and weather more erratic across the planet. And that’s posing new risks to the sanctuary scientists like Janzen and Hallwachs have created at ACG.

María Marta Chavarría, ACG’s field investigation program coordinator, describes the unpredictability as “el alegrón de burro.” Strictly translated from Spanish, it means “donkey happiness.” Colloquially, it describes a fake-out: short-lived joy from a false start.

Chavarría, who speaks with the upbeat tilt of an educator excited to teach, explains it like this, “A big rain is the trigger. It’s time! The rainy season is going to start!” Trees unfurl new leaves. Moths and other insects that eat those leaves emerge. But now, the rains don’t always last. The leaves die and fall. That has ripple effects across the food chain, from the insects that eat the leaves to birds that eat the insects. They perish or move on. And next season, there are fewer pollinators for the plants. “The big trigger in the beginning was false,” Chavarría explains. “They started, but no more.”

In 1978, Janzen jumped down a ravine because he was “young and carefree and just 40 years old,” in his words. Slipping on wet rocks, he broke three ribs. While recuperating, he spent a month sitting outside of his home on the edge of the forest in the evenings. Next to a 25-watt light bulb outside, the “front wall was literally plastered with adult moths,” he recalls in a 2021 paper he and Hallwachs published in the journal PNAS. The title was “To us insectometers, it is clear that insect decline in our Costa Rican tropics is real, so let’s be kind to the survivors.”

That observation in 1978 led the couple to focus their research on caterpillars and their parasites. In 1980, they used light traps to inventory moth species across the country, documenting at least 10,000 species. Since then, however, they’ve seen a steady decline in caterpillars whose feces used to blanket the forest floor.

Hanging a white sheet and lights at the edge of a cliff overlooking a vast stretch of both old and new-growth forests, they photographed moths that came to rest on the sheet in 1984, 1995, 2007, and 2019. The first photograph is an impressive tapestry of many different winged critters. By 2019, that’s been reduced to a mostly white sheet speckled here and there with far fewer moths. Instead of an intricate tapestry of wings and antennae, the sheet looks more like a blank canvas an artist has only started to splatter with a brush.

Hallwachs and Janzen can see the same phenomenon now standing in broad daylight in the forest across from the field. Just because forests have come roaring back across the ACG doesn’t mean the struggle to survive is over.

How to turn a ranch into a forest

In a roundabout way, butterflies brought Janzen to Guanacaste. A ninth-grade trip to collect butterflies in Mexico sparked his love of tropical ecosystems in the 1950s. He returned to Veracruz, Mexico, as a PhD student a decade later, collecting insects for a research project. Guanacaste is biologically similar to Veracruz, Janzen says — filled with tropical dry forests. The parallels brought him to Costa Rica in 1963 to research interactions between plants and animals.

Compared to rainforests that have cafes and even an e-commerce giant named after them, dry forests arguably aren’t in the spotlight so much. And yet they’re disappearing faster across Latin America than their rainier counterparts. Dry forests are less humid and a little more hospitable to people and agriculture, so people came to raze them. In Costa Rica, which exported as much as 60 percent of its beef to Burger King at one point, ranches and pastures replaced forests. Grasses, good for cows, grew in their place. Between 1940 and 1990, forest cover in Costa Rica shrank from 75 to just 29 percent.

Another American conservationist, Kenton Miller, first envisioned a national park in Guanacaste in 1966. Commissioned by the Costa Rican government to plan a national monument to one of the country’s oldest ranches in the area, he instead made the case for preserving a stretch of Guanacaste’s remaining, albeit damaged, dry forest. The aim was to protect 10,400 hectares of land that’s now the Parque Nacional Santa Rosa. And Miller wanted to do more. Park staff still quote him saying his “dream was the creation of a national park that would stretch from the sea to the peaks of mountains and volcanoes.”

Janzen was ambling around the area around the same time, albeit more focused on research than conservation. “I studied it, they saved it,” he wrote in 2000. Hallwachs joined him as a volunteer research assistant in 1978, and the two married soon after.

In Santa Rosa, Hallwachs studied agoutis, rodents that can get to be about as big as domestic cats. She devised an ingenious way to study how the animals disperse seeds throughout the forest, Janzen boasts proudly, by placing a bobbin of thread inside the thick-skinned fruit of the guapinol tree that agoutis bury to eat later.

The nature of their work started to change in 1985 after a trip to study Australia’s dry forests. There, they saw how ranchers’ fires had caused so much devastation over the years that even some biologists had no idea that what they saw as grass plains were really overgrown pastures that used to be forest. They realized that fires could do the same in Guanacaste, as long as the grass remained.

The problem is sometimes called the human-grass-fire cycle: when invasive grasses, often introduced through agriculture, crowd out forests and then dry out and become fuel, making the landscape more fire-prone. It’s a threat in a lot of places outside of Costa Rica, contributing to the devastating fire that tore through Maui last year.

In Guanacaste, ranchers had wielded fire since the 1600s to keep the forest at bay, preventing it from creeping back into pastures. If Santa Rosa was to survive, fires and invasive grasses would have to go. The national park would also need to grow with the support of the local community.

The couple drafted a plan to expand Santa Rosa into a larger conservation area, enlisting residents’ help in stamping out fires and even hiring former ranch hands to form a firefighting crew. Over 30 years, the initiative to create ACG raised enough money to buy more than 350 surrounding farms and ranches. Serendipitously, by the 1990s, declining international beef prices and a landmark forest law that outlawed deforestation and paid people to protect natural resources also served to transform the landscape across Costa Rica.

It’s a victory that, lately, has been in the shadow of splashy commitments by influencers, billionaires, and policymakers to plant a ton of trees. It’s become a popular way for companies and consumers to try to offset some of their environmental footprint. “We see all the hype coming from people who are going to plant a billion trees and nobody gives us any credit,” Janzen laments. What’s worse, a lot of those corporate tree-planting campaigns are fundamentally flawed.

“A lot of the reforestation projects are kind of assuming that trees are mechanical objects,” Hallwachs says. But they don’t stand alone, not in a healthy forest.

Merely plant rows of trees, and the result is a tree plantation — not a forest. Bringing back a forest is a much different endeavor. It’s more about restoring relationships — reconnecting remaining forests with land that’s been cleared and nurturing new kinds of connections between people and the land.

In ACG’s dry forest, they didn’t have to plant trees by hand. By getting rid of the grass and stopping the fires, they cleared the way for the forest’s return. The first seeds blew in with the wind.

Hallwachs and Janzen recognize them like old friends — stopping next to a Dalbergia tree that was one of the first to grow where they stomped out the fires. Its seeds are light and flat, allowing them to float on a breeze. When those trees start to grow, they attract animals in search of food or shelter.

Janzen measures each animal up by how many seeds they can hold and then spit or defecate onto the forest floor. “When you see a bird fly by, what you’re seeing is a tablespoon full of seeds,” he says. “Every deer you see is a liter of seeds.”

Now, ACG is estimated to hold as many as 235,000 different terrestrial species — representing around 2.6 percent of global biodiversity. For comparison, Costa Rica as a whole holds roughly 4 percent of the world’s biodiversity, home to more species than the US and Canada combined. The ACG is now a world heritage site spanning not just dry forest but nearby rainforest, cloud forest, and marine ecosystems.

The forest across the field is considered “secondary.” In other words, it’s not the original forest; it’s one that’s grown back after being cleared. Today, more than 75 percent of the country is blanketed by forest, and more than half of that canopy is young secondary forest. It plays a critical role in protecting biodiversity, giving threatened species a home and slowing climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

It’s also where the couple has built a humble home nestled under a secondary canopy. They spend three months at a time here, bouncing back and forth between Guanacaste and Philadelphia, where Janzen is a professor of biology emeritus and Hallwachs is a research biologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

The front porch is a couple of plastic lawn chairs on the forest floor, shaded by corrugated metal. A web of clotheslines hangs from wooden rafters inside, clothespins securing bags of plants and other specimens they’ve collected over the years. Somewhere among the glass jars and more plastic bags on Janzen’s desk, he fishes out a wooden bobbin like those that his wife used to track agoutis’ movements by following threads along the forest floor. Now, there’s an agouti foraging outside the front door the couple keeps open to the forest.

“There was a time when we thought [agoutis] would never show up at our house because our house was in the pasture. It was so far away from all of this,” Janzen recalls. “Today, they’re there every morning.”

“The living dead”

A short drive from Janzen and Hallwachs’ home, along a stretch of the winding paved road through the ACG, the tree canopy seems to close in overhead. With the windows rolled down, you can smell the shift to musty, moist earth. Stop and step outside, and the forest floor is darker, spongier. The thick foliage above filters out more sunlight; more of those leaves have accumulated and decayed on the ground for centuries without burning. In other parts of the park, Janzen can bring his walking stick down with a thud, hitting harder, more compact soil. Here, his walking stick rustles through layers of leaf litter.

“You’re standing in the only piece of original dry forest between Brownsville, Texas, and the Panama Canal [along] a paved road,” Janzen says.

This 22-hectare sprawl, just half as big as the Mall of America, is a gem in the ACG. It’s the source of seeds that blew into old pastures. In an ideal world — with several more centuries and a stable climate — primary forests like this might have grown to infiltrate the secondary forests it now has as neighbors. In other words, more of the ACG might look and feel like this original forest.

“The intent was always that. Then comes climate change,” Hallwachs says.

While it’s hotter and drier in this part of the world because of climate change, it’s noticeably cooler in the original forest than in areas nearby that have been razed. It’s another benefit of the old evergreen trees towering overhead. Janzen leads us to a 300-year-old tree. The common name for it, he explains, is chicle — the Spanish word for chewing gum, which can be made from the white latex under its bark.

We visit another ancient tree, the guapinol. Amber jewelry is made from its fossil resin. Its seeds are the same ones the agouti bury across the forest. “And that’s how the forest moves,” Janzen says.

But the last time the tree bore fruit was about 25 years ago. For a tree that only flowers every quarter-century, everything needs to be just right for it to successfully reproduce — enough water and nutrients and plenty of pollinators (in the guapinol’s case, bats). If that doesn’t happen, you could lose the next generation. Here in the ACG, the guapinol is one of what Hallwachs and Janzen call “the living dead.”

“The climate for their successful reproduction has already moved on,” Hallwachs says. “So what will be here in 25 years? We are very much hoping there will be forest in 25, 50 years. But there will be some of these classic species that won’t be able to make it.”

“This is what gives me hope”

The forest is changing faster than Janzen, Hallwachs, and other researchers can document. There’s not much to do about it except to stop climate change and deforestation, they say, and keep on with their work of restoring the landscape. The ACG’s other ecosystems have suffered from climate change, too — from coral reefs losing their color in the heat to cloud forests losing their clouds.

“At this point in time and budgets, ACG does not require more classical academic scientific study of climate change impacts,” they wrote in their 2021 PNAS article. “Confronted with a metaphorical burning house today in the tropics, the critical priority is the complex of fire departments, fire codes, fire alarms, fire exits, emergency rooms for burn victims, and rules and views that prohibit candles in Christmas trees, rather than for more and fancier thermometers.”

Scrolling through photos of ACG’s coral reef bleaching last year, Chavarría tells The Verge, “This is really hard for me being here, documenting this. Sometimes I want to cry.” The water was so hot it felt like jumping into soup. Under stress, corals expel the algae that give them their color and energy. If the bleaching lasts too long, the corals could die.

She’s tried to get funding to restore the reef and figure out which corals could be more resilient to climate change but hasn’t had luck yet, she says. Still, she believes they can be saved. “This is what gives me hope,” she says, pointing to a colony of coral that didn’t bleach. It’s still pink. This is what conservationists should pay attention to, she says, her voice still upbeat.

When things get rough, Chavarría heads to a lookout point where she can see the hectares of forest below that she’s helped to revive. It reminds her of what’s possible.

There is still hope and growth in Guanacaste. The ACG team’s restoration efforts are expanding outside of its official borders. Working with local women on a former salt flat, Chavarría is restoring a coastal mangrove forest, which has proven to be even more effective at storing carbon dioxide than other kinds of forests of the same size, keeping the greenhouse gas from further heating the planet. Thick mangrove roots also grip the earth so tightly that they can protect coastlines from rising seas and erosion.

The project is also expected to improve fishing prospects for residents who depend on it for food and livelihood. That kind of community buy-in to the forests’ survival has been one of the pillars of ACG since its inception. Officially, they call it biodesarrollo, or biodevelopment. In practice, it’s relationship-building. Chavarría started a program for kids in a local fishing town, taking them snorkeling to learn more about the ocean ecosystem. She remembers one of the very first kids in the program jumping out of the water, screaming, “María, they are colorful!” Before that moment, she says, “These kids know the fish just fried in the pan, never alive in the reef.” The program got mothers in town curious and, now, more involved in projects like restoring the mangrove forest.

It’s tough work, planting seedlings along newly dug canals while your boots sink into brackish mud. But they won’t have to plant too many trees — just enough to stabilize water canals that bring back the natural ebb and flow of the tide to this former salt flat. Each tide washes away layers of salt, picks up seedlings from surviving mangrove trees nearby, and deposits them here to grow.

Photography by Justine Calma / The Verge

The International Center for Journalists supported this reporting, and Punto y Aparte contributed to the report.

I paid a lot of money for the privilege of getting an Apple Vision Pro brand-new in February. All-in, with optical inserts and taxes, I financed a little over $3,900 for the 256GB version of the headset. A day or so ago, I made a mistake that I’m sure many early adopters are familiar with: I looked up how much it’s been selling for on eBay.

On Wednesday, a 1TB Vision Pro, complete with all the included gear, Apple’s fluffy $200 travel case, $500 AppleCare Plus, and claimed to have been “worn maybe about an hour” sold for $3,200 after 21 bids. The listed shipping estimate was $20.30. Brand new, that combination is $5,007.03 on Apple’s site for me. Another eBay listing, this one with my headset’s configuration (but sans optical inserts) went for just $2,600 — again with most, if not all, of the included accessories. Several other 256GB and 512GB models sold for around that amount this week.

The story is no different over on Swappa, a popular reselling site among Apple users:

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

This, of course, is how the story goes for early adopters, especially when you’re buying very expensive tech before the mainstream catches on. Apple’s pricing doesn’t help matters, especially when the next closest competing headset — the Meta Quest 3 — is just $500. It’s a bummer even if they’re ultimately not all that comparable, at least in terms of their targeted audiences and goals for their platforms.

But it still stings, doesn’t it? Knowing I could have saved several hundred dollars and gotten the highest storage configuration, AppleCare Plus, and a storage case is particularly painful. I like the Vision Pro plenty — maybe more than any other writer at The Verge — but if I hadn’t missed the return window, I would send mine right back to Apple in a heartbeat just so I could get one of these deals. Thankfully, when I’m wearing the headset, nobody can see my tears.

Image: Wes Davis / The Verge

It was Valentine’s Day when Meta’s ad platform started going off the rails. RC Williams, the co-founder of the Philadelphia-based marketing agency 1-800-D2C, had set one of Meta’s automated ad tools to run campaigns for two separate clients. But when he checked the platform that day, he found that Meta had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours.

Williams told The Verge that the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal. A usual CPM of under $28 had inflated to roughly $250, way above the industry average. That would have been bad enough if the revenue earned from those ads wasn’t nearly zero. If you’re not a marketer, this might feel like spending a week’s worth of grocery money on a prime cut of wagyu at a steakhouse, only for the waiter to return with a floppy slider.

The Verge spoke to several marketers and businesses that advertise on Meta’s platforms who tell a similar story. Meta’s automated ad platform has been blowing through budgets and failing to deliver sales. Small businesses have seen their ad dollars get wiped out and wasted as a result, and some have said the bouts of overspending are driving them from Meta’s platforms.

“Meta’s unwillingness to be transparent or accountable with the performance issues and glitches is causing mass uncertainty,” Karl Baker, founder of meditation startup Mindfulness Works, wrote in a message to The Verge.

The faulty ad service in question, known as Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, is part of a full suite of AI-enabled ad tools that Meta pitches to businesses as a faster and more efficient alternative to manual ad campaigns. To create an ad campaign, advertisers upload their creative assets, pick their conversion goals (e.g., getting more customers to make purchases on Instagram), and then set their budget caps. Meta hyped Advantage Plus shopping campaigns during earnings calls as a carefree, “set it and forget it” automated solution to online ads. But that hasn’t been the case, marketers say.

Advantage Plus shopping campaigns have been unpredictable, seemingly working well on some days and then not so well on other days. The subreddit r/FacebookAds has become a sort of 24/7 help desk for Advantage Plus. Recent headings discussing the issues include “Advantage+ sucks,” “Is Facebook broken rn,” and “Is it just me?”

“People are always saying, ‘Is it me?’ or ‘Is it Meta?’” Baker said.

What Williams and many other marketers thought was a one-time glitch by Advantage Plus ended up becoming a recurring incident for weeks. “Since February 14th, [Advantage Plus] has overspent on numerous occasions and ignored the cost caps we have in place on it,” he said.

Problems have persisted into April. “We have a couple of clients for whom we completely stopped Advantage Plus due to these anomalies,” said Aniruddha Mishra, director of growth at Miami-based digital marketing agency Node Media. He noted that for some clients, CPMs on Meta were anywhere from three to four times more expensive than they were last year.

Advertisers say getting support from Meta has been a challenge, too. Meta laid off thousands of employees over the past year and gutted many of its customer support teams. As Digiday reported, Meta’s ad accounts teams were downsized, and many client inquiries are now being directed to AI chatbots. Several of the marketers that The Verge spoke to said that there’s been a noticeable decline in responsiveness from Meta since the transition.

“The only thing [Meta] acknowledged was there was a platform bug on February 14th and apologized for the inconvenience,” said Williams. “They didn’t tell us what actually happened.”

Meta eventually refunded 1-800-D2C for the incident, but Williams said it took him several tries to finally get someone from the company to acknowledge him. The company issued the refund almost a month after the incident.

While some users speculate that Advantage Plus is “glitching” or “broken,” Meta’s response has been to insist that the tool is functioning as it should.

“I’ve reached out to representatives at Meta, and I’ve been told that they’re not aware of any sort of glitch, which is truly shocking, because all my co-founder friends who work in e-commerce share this sentiment. They’re dealing with the same thing,” said Adriel Darvish, the CEO of a luxury handbag and jewelry service called Switch, in a phone interview with The Verge. “This is something universal that everyone is experiencing.”

With the problems continuing to pile on, Williams said his marketing firm completely halted its use of Advantage Plus in early April. Instead, they’ve gone back to the old-fashioned method of buying Facebook and Instagram ads manually. Notably, going back to the pre-AI, pre-automated way of doing things hasn’t really taken a toll on the firm’s human labor force.

“Maybe an extra 10 to 20 minutes or so to build out the ad sets, but nothing crazy,” said Williams.

Meta first launched Advantage Plus shopping campaigns globally in the fall of 2022, when the state of online advertising was in an uncertain place. Just a year before, Apple had launched its App Tracking Transparency feature with iOS 14.5, giving users an easy way to opt out of the third-party app-based tracking that powers many online ads. Meta opposed the change, saying it would “change the internet as we know it” and threaten the future of many online businesses.

But Meta’s real concern was no doubt the threat to its own ad business, which chalked up a $10 billion dip in ad revenue in 2021 due to Apple’s changes. Targeted ads were no longer as effective since brands no longer had access to as much data, and they were becoming more expensive to boot. As a consequence, brands cut back on their online ad spend.

With Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, Meta promised that AI and machine learning models could effectively replace the big gaping hole left by Apple’s privacy update.

In lieu of tracking users, Advantage Plus uses the advertiser’s own first-party sales data to help target ads. But online advertisers would be effectively handing the reins over to Meta and no longer have access to the granular targeting controls and detailed analytics they did prior to Apple’s privacy changes.

Although there was a bit of a “learning curve” with Advantage Plus shopping, the tool gradually began to improve. Brands noticed their AI-driven Meta ad campaigns were performing well and poured more of their budgets into the platform. Adweek reported that by April 2023, marketers who had ditched Meta for TikTok ads and newer opportunities like connected TV were starting to come back.

Advertisers had a honeymoon period with Advantage Plus last year, especially as Meta began packing it with new features. “Advantage Plus was working so well at this point, for most of the clients, that almost 50 to 70 percent of their ad budget is on Meta’s Advantage Plus campaigns. There are so many targeting and evolutions they’ve done in the past year and a half. It delivers a really strong performance if you know how to tweak the right parameters,” said Mishra.

In an email to The Verge on April 15th, Meta spokesperson Kash Ayodele said the company had fixed a “few technical issues” with the Advantage Plus ad platform. “Our ads system is working as expected for the vast majority of advertisers. We recently fixed a few technical issues and are researching a small amount of additional reports from advertisers to ensure the best possible results for businesses using our apps.”

But marketers are still complaining about underperformance on the platform. “Things have recovered for many, but not all. It’s been a very turbulent end to Q1 and beginning of Q2,” wrote media buyer David Herrmann in a direct message to The Verge.

The dramatic increase in cost per click (CPC) and CPM is not just a Meta problem — online ads as a whole are getting costlier due to what marketers say are increased inefficiencies, which automation has only made worse. This significantly decreases profits for individual advertisers. And fixing this problem may be more complicated than fixing a “glitch” or series of glitches on Advantage Plus, especially since the millions that Meta as well as Google have poured into automated advertising hasn’t led to more successful ad campaigns.

“The performance of accounts and campaigns hasn’t intrinsically increased [over the last three years],” noted Hawke Media’s Areen Mayelan.

When ad campaigns are automated, such as with Meta’s Advantage Plus, “things get brushed under the rug,” said Mayelan. Everything from loose keywords to loose audiences to low-quality ads all effectively become inefficiencies that increase the cost of ads for brands. “Inefficiency results in an increase in CPCs and CPMs, because you’re creating artificial ‘competition’ where there otherwise might not be.”

Meanwhile, Meta only stands to benefit from the boost in ad revenue. According to Meta’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday, its ad business is doing just fine. Ad revenue amounted to $35.64 billion for the quarter, an impressive jump of 27 percent from this time in 2023.