Meta’s AI optimism runs into Bowie’s apocalypse

Meta is pitching artificial intelligence as a force for human connection, but the soundtrack to its latest feel-good ad is David Bowie’s 1972 song “Five Years,” a meditation on the end of the world.

Published on Meta’s official Instagram account Thursday morning, the ad insists that AI will not “make us less connected” or “leave us behind.” It shows a toddler playing with a butterfly, parents laughing with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waving at the Knicks Championship Parade.

“Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want — but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds.”

The spot also highlights purportedly positive uses for Meta’s controversial smart glasses, while avoiding more troubling examples such as women being harassed while being secretly recorded.

The Bowie song behind Meta’s optimism

The section of “Five Years” used in the commercial references telephones, opera houses, electric irons, televisions, and the many different kinds of people in the world. Meta leaves out the song’s opening, which begins with news that “Earth was really dying” and that humanity had five years left.

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Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said the company wanted to emphasize Bowie’s own interpretation of the song as an optimistic statement about the future. Brennan supplied a 1972 quote attributed to Bowie through BowieBible.com and originally sourced to NME Magazine:

“People are so incredibly serious and scared of the future that I would wish to turn the feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism. If one can take the micky out of the future, and what it is going to be like … It’s going to be unbelievably technological.”

BowieBible.com also describes “Five Years” as a dystopian nightmare in which Earth enters its final five years for undisclosed reasons, followed by panic, violence, and attempts at redemption. The site quotes drummer Mick Woodmansey recalling that Bowie knew the song was “about the end of the world and pretty depressing” and cried while recording the vocal in 1972.

Tech companies keep selling optimism

Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director of Condé Nast sister publication Pitchfork, says taking songs out of context for commercials is a long-standing practice. He cited a Carnival Cruise ad using an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction and noted that Warner Chappell Music controls Bowie’s catalog and decides where his songs can be used.

“Meta choosing this specific song where the context for human connection is the apocalypse seems either really ignorant or really insidious. I don’t know, maybe in that context it’s genius.”

Larson added that hearing Bowie’s work used for AI “feels especially and specifically nonconsensual.” In a post about the ad, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company was focused on giving everyone tools to reach their full potential and ensuring technology’s benefits were distributed to everyone.

Meta’s campaign follows a familiar pattern. Anthropic recently released “There’s hope in hard questions,” an ad that opens with a burning building, asks who will “hit the brakes,” and briefly shows dozens of graves before shifting to families and a humpback whale. Google’s 2024 ad showed a father using Gemini to draft a letter from his aspiring-athlete daughter to hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

During the 2022 Super Bowl, FTX ran an ad starring Larry David dismissing inventions including the toilet, fork, and lightbulb before rejecting FTX itself. The ad ended with “Don’t be like Larry” and urged viewers not to miss crypto, NFTs, or “the next big thing.” FTX filed for bankruptcy about nine months later.

The ads show why technology companies reach for familiar cultural symbols and emotional appeals: their products are not always convincing people that they are improving the world on their own.