Make Product Ads With AI for Almost Free: A Beginner's Guide

Ever seen someone on TikTok holding a product and telling you why you need it? Those videos drive billions in sales—and now you can make them with AI, for about a dollar or even free.

Why this matters: TikTok Shop (a feature that lets people buy and sell products directly inside the TikTok app) is booming.

Here are the key numbers:

• $64.3 billion in global merchandise sold on TikTok Shop in 2025—nearly double the year before.
• $15.1 billion of that came from the U.S. alone.
• You can open a store with zero followers, and YouTube's Shopping affiliate program (where you earn commissions for promoting products) now opens at just 500 subscribers.

The old way vs. the new way: Making these ads used to need a real person, a phone, good lighting, and many takes. Now you just need a product photo and three AI tools—most of them free.

The simple 3-step workflow:

• Step 1 – Get a clean product photo. Pick something to sell, then crop the image so only the product shows (no background clutter or watermarks). The cleaner the photo, the better the AI result.
• Step 2 – Add a virtual model. Upload the photo to ChatGPT and use GPT Image 2 to place a realistic AI-generated person wearing or holding your product. You describe the model and setting in a written prompt (an instruction you type for the AI).
• Step 3 – Write the script with AI. Ask ChatGPT to write a punchy 10-second sales script, formatted in JSON (a structured text format that AI video tools follow closely). Google Flow then turns it into a talking video, and CapCut adds the final trim and subtitles.

The bottom line: With free or near-free AI tools, absolute beginners can now create professional-looking product ads. The total cost of AI computing power? Roughly a dollar or less per video.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://decrypt.co/373290/how-to-make-ai-ads-tiktok-youtube-free