On Thursday morning, Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not “make us less connected” or “leave us behind.” It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track “Five Years,” which is about, among other things, the end of the world.
“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 narrator says, as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks Championship Parade. (The ad also takes special care to highlight use cases for its controversial smart glasses that are not, say, harassing women while surreptitiously recording them.)
The snippet of “Five Years” used in the ad includes the following lyrics:
I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
And all the fat, skinny people
And all the tall, short people
And all the nobody people
And all the somebody people
I never thought I’d need so many people
Perhaps understandably, it skips other parts of the song, including the opening:
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said he “would like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about ‘Five Years’ and its meaning: having optimism for the future.” Brennan sent along a 1972 quote about the song that he sourced to BowieBible.com.
“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,” reads the quote, which is itself sourced from NME Magazine. “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.”
Nevertheless, BowieBible.com also notes that the song “speaks of a dystopian nightmare in which Earth enters its final five years, for reasons undisclosed, and the ensuing panic, violence, and attempts at redemption.”
BowieBible.com also quotes from a 2018 interview with drummer Mick Woodmansey: “Well, we chatted about it, and we knew it was about the end of the world and pretty depressing,” Woodmansey said of the song. “I remember when we recorded it, he was actually in tears. He was doing the vocal and he was actually crying.”
According to Jeremy D. Larson, the deputy director of Condé Nast sister publication Pitchfork, taking songs out of context for commercials is a time-honored tradition. He points to a Carnival Cruise ad that uses an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction. (He also says that since Warner Chappell Music owns Bowie’s catalog, they are the ones with discretion over where his songs end up.)
“Meta choosing this specific song where the context for human connection is the apocalypse seems either really ignorant or really insidious,” Larson tells WIRED over Slack. “I don’t know, maybe in that context it’s genius.”
“Hearing [Bowie’s] work used for AI just feels especially and specifically nonconsensual,” he adds. (CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a post about the ad, wrote that the company was “focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.”)
Over the past few years, tech companies have made several heavy-handed attempts to assuage people’s fears about their technology making the world worse. Just a few weeks ago, Anthropic released its own lofty ad, “There’s hope in hard questions.” It opens with a clip of a burning building and asks, “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” before flashing over dozens of graves. The tone of the ad gradually shifts toward optimism, and ends with vague questions like, “What if we started to be more human again?” over images of families and a humpback whale.
In 2024, Google released a baffling ad about a father teaching his daughter, an aspiring athlete, how to hurdle. The father decides that he should use Gemini to draft a letter, from the perspective of his daughter, so that she can send it to decorated hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. And during the 2022 Super Bowl, FTX aired a now-notorious ad starring Larry David, playing various Larry-esque characters, dismissing useful inventions throughout history—the toilet! the fork! the lightbulb!—before ultimately dismissing FTX.
“Don’t be like Larry,” reads the text overlay at the end of the ad. “Don’t miss out on crypto, on NFTs, on the next big thing.”
FTX filed for bankruptcy about nine months later.
Of course, it’s understandable that tech companies would use every tool at their disposal to increase goodwill. But the ads also demonstrate that many tech companies are failing to sell products that independently convince people that they are not actively making the world worse.
