REI got roasted for a nonsensical Instagram ad featuring a bike with 2 sets of handlebars — and blamed a Meta AI tool

• REI faced backlash after an Instagram ad featured a bike with two sets of handlebars.
• REI said the ad was generated by Meta’s AI ad tool.
• Meta has said its AI creative tools for ads are used by millions of advertisers.

A recent Instagram ad from outdoor retailer REI Co-op drew backlash after some users noticed that the bike in the image seemed to have a unique feature: two sets of handlebars.

“REI using AI slop now. So much for caring about the environment,” read a Reddit post over the weekend about the ad that received hundreds of upvotes.

Turns out the image was the result of AI adjustments, with REI pointing to an AI tool from Meta, Instagram’s parent company.

“Meta auto-enrolled us in an AI personalization tool that produced an inaccurate and inappropriate alteration of a vendor-provided image in some of our ads,” an REI spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider. “While a two-handled bike might be interesting, it is not something you will find in our assortment.”

The image, which promoted a bike from the brand Van Rysel, showed a woman in a park standing beside the oddly shaped bike.

Van Rysel North America confirmed to Business Insider that the original image supplied to REI came from a Van Rysel photo shoot featuring cyclist Amity Rockwell, adding, “Any later alterations were not made by Van Rysel.”

Meta declined to comment when reached by Business Insider.

The company’s terms for its generative AI ad tools state that AI-generated ad outputs may be “inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, offensive, and/or inappropriate” and that advertisers are responsible for evaluating them before use.

The REI spokesperson said the company unenrolled from the Meta tool, adding, “This does not align with our values or how we manage our brand. Product accuracy and our vendor relationships matter. We apologize for the confusion this caused.”

REI is not the first advertiser to report unexpected results from Meta’s AI ad tools. As Business Insider previously reported, several advertisers said Meta’s AI tool had also generated bizarre or nonsensical ads for their products, and that some settings, like “test new creative features” and “automatic adjustments,” had automatically been toggled to “on.”

A Meta spokesperson at the time said advertisers who use full image generation “have the opportunity to review the generated images before running their ad.” They also said millions of advertisers had found their AI ad creative tools valuable and that the tools improved their ad performance.