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TikTok's automatic enhancements are on by default: what each one changes and how to turn them off

TikTok says its creative enhancement drawer is on by default and remembers your last settings. What each enhancement changes, and where to switch it off.

TikTok's creative enhancements start switched on. Its help page How to use creative enhancement drawer, last updated October 2026, ends on this note: "Creative enhancement drawer are turned on by default and TikTok Ads Manager will save the most recently used settings for future campaigns." The drawer edits the videos and images you upload to a Smart+ campaign: higher resolution, trending background music, translation and dubbing, full-screen resizing, tailored calls to action, generated ad cards and AI backgrounds behind your products. You switch them off in one panel, Ad enhancements and display options, and whatever you leave there is where your next campaign starts.

Are TikTok's automatic enhancements on by default?

The October 2026 drawer page says they are. TikTok's older overview, About Smart+ Campaigns, last updated June 2025, puts it differently, describing TikTok's creative AI features, music among them, as optional:

These optional creative AI features include adding and remixing various elements, such as music, hooks, formats, and scripts, to generate and deliver multiple variations of ads. You can also choose to turn off Smart+ generated creatives in TikTok Ads Manager at any time.

The two pages can both be right. Optional means there is an off switch, and the October page says where that switch starts.

TikTok's October pages don't agree on every switch, though. The drawer page's steps include "Toggle Automatic Backgrounds ON", while its features list calls the same thing Default automatic backgrounds. And TikTok's guide to creating campaigns in the upgraded Smart+ experience tells Web Traffic advertisers to "open Automatic enhancements and turn on AI-generated Content call-to-action (or AIGC CTA)", and catalog advertisers to "opt in to the catalog enhancements you want to apply." Read the drawer's state in each campaign rather than trusting either page.

The memory matters too. TikTok doesn't say whether "the most recently used settings" are kept per person or per ad account, which counts when several people build campaigns in one account.

Where is the creative enhancement drawer?

In the ad step of a Smart+ campaign, under a new name. From the drawer page: "The creative customization section formerly known as Creative enhancements in TikTok Ads Manager has been rebranded to Ad enhancements and display options." If you are looking for a section called Creative enhancements, that is the old label.

TikTok calls the drawer "a centralized control hub for all creative enhancement tools in TikTok Ads Manager" and says it "utilizes TikTok's latest Symphony AIGC capabilities to automatically optimize videos and images that are uploaded when creating ad campaigns." The page lists one prerequisite: "You'll need to create a Smart+ Lead, Smart+ Web, or Smart+App ad campaign in TikTok Ads Manager." It works on Spark Ads and non-Spark Ads. Two of its features, the CTA enhancement and the AI-generated ad card, are supported in App and Web campaigns.

That "all" is generous. Several TikTok tools that change or add creative have switches somewhere else in the flow, and they are in the table below.

What does each TikTok enhancement change?

The first seven rows are the drawer. The rest are the other places TikTok changes or adds creative in a campaign.

EnhancementWhat it changes, in TikTok's wordsOn by default?Where you switch it off
Image Quality, Video Quality"improve the overall video visual quality through increased resolution"Yes, per the drawer noteThe drawer
Resize for TikTokResizes "your images into full screen"Yes, per the drawer noteThe drawer
Refresh for TikTok"add or change background music based on trending TikTok content"Yes, per the drawer noteThe drawer
Translation and dub"Translates English video and text captions into other languages"Yes, per the drawer noteThe drawer
CTA EnhancementTailors your call to action from "landing pages, app store, and ad creative content"Yes, per the drawer noteThe drawer
AI-Generated Ad Cards"auto-generated visuals from display cards" built from your landing page or app storeYes, per the drawer noteThe drawer
Automatic Backgrounds"Automatically applies GenAI backgrounds to products with plain backdrops"Unclear: named "Default", but the steps say to toggle it onThe drawer's Automatic Backgrounds toggle
Auto-generated for you"New AI-generated creatives and variations built from your destination URL"Not statedRecommended tab: uncheck them and leave auto-add off
Creative combinationsAds "generated based on combinations of your videos and ad texts"It is how Smart+ builds adsOne creative and one text per ad
Multilingual toolTranslates "an ad's audio into other languages and adds text captions"Not statedThe Use TikTok Multilingual tool toggle under Ads generation
Automate CreativeResolution, music swapped in from the Commercial Music Library, image resizing, audio effects, and features "being tested for a portion of advertisers"You "toggle on"The Automate Creative toggle under Ad creatives (or Creative assets)
Auto-selected creatives"Content generated for you" from your own videos and your app store pageNot statedSwitch to custom selection mode

CTA Enhancement writes copy you didn't pick. TikTok's page About Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons in your ads says: "With this feature toggle on, you allow the TikTok Ads Manager system to generate more CTA texts during campaigns without selection."

Translation has two switches. Translation and dub sits in the drawer. The Multilingual tool, for Smart+ campaigns only, is a separate toggle, and when it is on, "an ad's audio and captions will be translated to supported languages for each user based on the user's device language setting." To keep an ad in one language, check both.

Music can change in three places: Refresh for TikTok in the drawer, Music enhancement in Automate Creative, and the variations TikTok generates for you. Recommended Creatives "may use creative strategies such as Remix, Hook/Avatar, Music, Caption, and Add CTA to produce variations."

Resize turns an image into a full-screen one, and on a full-screen ad TikTok's interface covers strips at the top, bottom and sides, plus a column down the right. If you'd rather decide what sits there, make the full-screen version yourself and drop it into the free safe zone checker before you upload.

How do you turn off TikTok's automatic enhancements?

In the drawer, campaign by campaign. TikTok's steps, with the switches named:

  1. In your ad settings, go to Creative assets.
  2. Under Ad settings, find Ad enhancements and display options and click the pencil icon.
  3. Uncheck the box in the top-right corner of each feature you don't want: Image Quality and Resize for images; Video Quality, Refresh for TikTok and Translation and dub for videos; CTA Enhancement and AI-Generated Ad Cards for all content.
  4. Switch Automatic Backgrounds off.
  5. Click Save. As you carry on, the drawer area shows "the optimization features you have turned on and those that are turned off."

Then the switches outside the drawer. In the Recommended tab of the Select assets drawer, uncheck anything under Auto-generated for you and leave the auto-add toggle off. If you do use auto-add, TikTok lets you turn on an approval requirement, and you then get "a daily batch summary of creatives pending review." Where approval controls appear (TikTok names eligible Web Traffic campaigns), the three choices are Add upon my approval, Auto-add and notify and Don't Add. To stop Smart+ mixing and matching your assets, TikTok's advice is to "add only one creative asset and one text copy to each ad." And check the Use TikTok Multilingual tool toggle under Ads generation.

Some accounts also have Manual Mode. TikTok's page on switching to manual settings says the upgraded flow "applies certain automated settings by default", and the button changes "budget, placement, targeting, catalog, and creative to manual settings" in one click. It is available for Lead Generation and App Promotion campaigns, and for select Sales campaigns. The page doesn't spell out what "creative" covers, so open the drawer afterwards and look.

Can you turn them off after the campaign is published?

It depends on the tool, and for two of them the answer is no.

  • Automate Creative is locked at launch: "Once the ad campaign is published, you cannot change the Automate Creative settings, including whether it is enabled or disabled. You must create a new campaign to use different Automate Creative settings."
  • The Multilingual tool freezes the whole campaign. TikTok's how-to page says: "No changes are allowed to be made during the campaign, including adding, deleting or changing parameters for the campaign, ad group, or ad creatives."
  • Generated creatives can be switched off. Besides the "at any time" line on the June 2025 overview, the Campaign List (the Campaigns tab, then Ad in the left menu) lets you turn each Smart+ creative on or off, one at a time or in bulk. Auto-add "generates new creatives rather than replacing creatives you manually selected, and creatives you pause or delete are not automatically restored."

The drawer page says nothing either way about changing enhancements after launch, so set them before you publish.

Does TikTok label ads it enhanced with AI?

For creatives TikTok generates, yes. The Recommended Creatives page says creatives from the Auto-generated for you module "are labeled as AI-generated and carry watermarks so both advertisers and viewers can identify AI content", and names the two layers: "an invisible watermark embedded in the asset and, where required, a visible manifest label." TikTok's newsroom wrote in June 2025 that "Symphony content is automatically labeled as AI-generated", Symphony being its suite of generative AI tools.

For your own video after the drawer has worked on it, TikTok doesn't say. The drawer page says it runs on "Symphony AIGC capabilities" but never mentions a label, and neither page says whether an upload the drawer enhanced counts as Symphony content.

What TikTok does say is that disclosure is your job. Its ad disclaimer page makes a disclaimer mandatory for "AI-generated, synthetic, or manipulated media", and its ads policy, Misleading and false content, warns: "If we identify AI-generated content that has not been disclosed, your ad will be rejected or restricted." The same policy counts "Removing or modifying backgrounds" as an insignificant AI edit, one of the "minor tweaks or enhancements", and "Making the primary subject say something they didn't actually say, using AI voice-cloning" as a significant one. The drawer page doesn't say whose voice Translation and dub uses. If you can't tell, TikTok's advice is that "it's best to use caution and label it accordingly." Where the label goes and how to switch it on are in what TikTok requires for AI-generated ads.

What is TikTok Smart+ 2.0?

The upgraded Smart+. TikTok's Japanese business blog called it "Smart+2.0" when it announced a webinar for October 30, 2025, and named asset groups and enhanced reporting among its creative upgrades. The English help center calls it the upgraded Smart+ experience. Its October 2026 page, About upgrades to Smart+, says "Manual and Smart+ experiences have been unified into a single flow" in which "you can tailor your campaign to full automation, partial automation, or fully manual." It still opens with "Note: This feature may not be available to you yet."

Three lines on that page decide what your creative goes through:

  • "Ads will be generated based on combinations of your videos and ad texts, and the high-performing combinations will be automatically delivered."
  • Each ad "functions like an asset group, with its own destination URL, product set, and up to 50 creative assets."
  • "Recommended Creatives can generate new assets, while Automatic Enhancements optimizes your assets with resizing, quality boosts, translation and dubbing, and more." The Automatic Enhancements link on that page goes to the drawer article.

Smart+ itself can be the default. TikTok's About Smart+ Web Campaigns says that for a Sales campaign with a website destination, "By default, the Smart+ campaign option may be toggled on. You can toggle the option off if you prefer to use a manual campaign."

How is this different from Meta's creative enhancements?

Meta picks its defaults per ad, by prediction, and spreads the switches over two panels, one of them collapsed (turning off Meta's creative enhancements, which Meta files under Advantage+ creative). TikTok puts the enhancements to your uploads in one drawer, starts it on and carries your last choice into the next campaign. A campaign built with everything off sets up the next one the same way, and so does a one-off test with everything on. ChatGPT ads have an account default plus a per-campaign setting.

When should you leave TikTok's enhancements on?

TikTok's pitch is narrower than the default suggests. It says its automatic AI enhancements are "recommended if you have limited creative assets or resources." With one product photo and no editor, generated backgrounds and full-screen resizes give you versions you wouldn't otherwise have. With a brand sound, approved claims and a type system, the drawer can put a trending track, CTA text nobody on your team wrote and a generated background into ads that already passed your review.

Either way, TikTok leaves the check with you. From the Recommended Creatives page: "Advertisers should review final creatives before publishing to confirm they meet their brand, legal, and regional requirements."

Sources

TikTok updates these pages without notice, and several of these tools reach accounts gradually, so check the page and its "Last updated" month before acting on it.

Terrads makes vertical TikTok ads from your product photos, with a voice, music and captions planned scene by scene before anything is made, so you can leave TikTok's enhancements off and still upload a finished ad.