A Pin Trading App Blames Meta's Advantage+ for an AI-Altered Ad of a Disney Creator

A Facebook ad for the Pin Trading app, a third-party service that identifies and values Disney pins, showed a creator with lighter skin, added freckles, a different nose and no gap between her front teeth. She says she never approved that version. The company that placed the ad says a Meta feature made it without anyone asking.

Disney-focused content creator Catherine, who posts as catonmainstreet_, described the alteration in a video posted to TikTok and Instagram on September 18, and said the clause she provided before the collaboration prohibited AI use in connection with the work. She said the image kept recognisable elements of her original promotional video, including her tattoos, her custom-made ears and her outfit. "I don't need a different version of me to be marketable," she said.

The app's account

Pin Trading App co-founders Andy and Emily said in a statement dated September 20 that Meta's Advantage+ Creative Standard Enhancements had been auto-enabled across their campaigns, and that the feature generated derivative versions of their ad creatives. Meta's own advertiser documentation describes that enhancement set as automatically creating variations of an ad with different text combinations, media enhancements and compositional changes, and automatically adjusting aspect ratio, brightness and contrast.

The statement says the differences she described go further than that list. The app accepted responsibility for leaving the feature enabled and unreviewed. "This was a systematic failure on our part and oversight for leaving this feature auto-enabled," the co-founders wrote, adding that no one on the team had instructed any system to alter her features, heritage or ethnicity.

By the app's account, Catherine made 19 original videos for it between February and July 2026 for $910, raised the altered ad with the company on August 7, and the company disabled its Meta ad campaigns that day. It is the app's account of the compensation exchange that has since become the second half of the dispute: it says her attorney sent an 83-page pre-suit settlement demand on September 2 seeking $85,000 alongside other demands, with a mutual release in exchange, and that it was still reviewing the letter when the September 17 response deadline passed.

The Pin Trading app is listed on the App Store as Pin Trading - Scan & Collect and operated by Evergreen Apps, LLC. It is not an official Walt Disney Company product, and it advertises a database of more than 150,000 pins behind 30 free scans and a $14.99 monthly or $39.99 yearly subscription.

What is not established

The claims have not been tested in court and no filing has been reported. Meta has not commented in the coverage, and its documentation does not describe generating a new likeness of a person in an advertiser's creative. WDWNT also reports that the app has previously used AI to enhance photographs and republished its photographs without permission, and that Meta has taken the account down more than once following its reports; the app's September 20 statement did not address those allegations. Catherine said in a follow-up statement on September 21 that her counsel had sent a demand addressing multiple alleged violations and that she would not publish further evidence while the matter is unresolved.

For creators, the practical detail is the default. The enhancement set the app points to is a setting inside an advertiser's account, and an advertiser who never opens that page can still have their creative rewritten.

Advantage+ Creative sits in Meta's ad settings and its documentation page lists the enhancements; the app's full statement is published at pintrading.io, and the dispute has not reached a court.