Meta wants you to feel good about AI. Its newest ad opens with black-and-white shots of someone reading panicked headlines, then cuts to color footage of couples dancing on rooftops, teens swimming in lakes, and friends hugging. A voiceover says, “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 message is warm, hopeful, and very much intentional from a company that has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to AI development.
There’s just one problem. According to TechCrunch, the song playing over all those smiling faces is David Bowie’s “Five Years.” If you know the track, you already see the issue. If you don’t, here’s the short version: it’s a song about humanity learning it has five years left before a mass extinction event. The lyrics include lines like “News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying.” It is not, by any reasonable interpretation, an optimistic song.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted the ad himself, writing that the company believes “the future is for everyone” and that AI should benefit all people. Nothing in his caption suggested anyone in the room caught the irony.
The section of the song used in the ad repeats the word “people” several times, which probably explains why it got selected. Stripped of its context, it sounds upbeat enough. But the lines directly before that section paint a very different picture. The narrator is describing a world in shock, watching the news as reporters break down on air while announcing that the planet is dying. Using that song to argue that AI will make humanity flourish is, at minimum, a strange creative choice.
This kind of disconnect between tech culture and the stories tech leaders borrow from is not exactly rare. A few examples worth noting:
- Meta’s Oculus used to give new hires a copy of “Ready Player One,” a novel set in a dystopia where a VR company becomes dangerously powerful and corrupt.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has cited the film “Her” as an inspiration, despite it being a cautionary story about the emotional dangers of AI companionship.
- Palantir, which builds AI surveillance tools for governments, named itself after the seeing stone in “Lord of the Rings” that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies.
- Elon Musk recently complained about the “accuracy” of a film adaptation of “The Odyssey,” a story involving sea monsters and gods.
Meta also isn’t the only AI company running strange ads right now. Anthropic recently released a video that opens with a burning house, then shows images of facial recognition surveillance, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows of cemetery graves, and what appears to be miners extracting raw materials for smartphones. The voiceover asks, “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” The intended message was that Anthropic is the responsible choice in AI development. The actual mood of the ad sits somewhere much closer to Bowie’s “Five Years” than to anything reassuring. Sam Altman responded to the Anthropic ad on social media, writing, “I thought this was satire.”
The ad wars between these companies matter because public trust in AI is already low and continuing to slide. A recent Pew Research survey found that only 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society over the next 20 years, while 40% expect a negative one. Both Meta’s misfire and Anthropic’s bleak imagery suggest that the biggest players in AI have not figured out how to talk to ordinary people about what they’re building, or why it should be welcomed rather than feared. Choosing a song about the apocalypse to make the case for optimism is a good summary of where that effort currently stands.
