Meta Put an AI Optimism Ad to a David Bowie Song About the Apocalypse — and Nobody at Meta Noticed
David Bowie's "Five Years" is about a man who learns the Earth has five years left before annihilation. He cries. He walks through the city watching strangers, realizing what they're about to lose. The song ends with him repeating "We've got five years" over and over, like a mantra against the void.
Meta used it as the soundtrack for an AI optimism commercial.
The ad, released by Meta on Wednesday, opens with a black-and-white shot of an eye scanning panicked headlines about AI taking jobs, fostering isolation, and sparking global crises. Then the video shifts to color: a couple dancing on a rooftop pointing at a rainbow. Teens swimming in a lake. A child frolicking in a field. Friends embracing. The 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 future is for everyone."
Meanwhile, the song playing underneath all of this is about the end of the world.
The song that wasn't screened
The excerpt of "Five Years" that Meta chose is a repeating chorus of the word "people" — easy to mistake for a generic anthem of human connection if you don't know the context. But the lines immediately before it tell a different story: "News had just come over / We had five years left to cry in / News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying / Cried so much his face was wet / Then I knew he was not lying."
Amanda Silberling at TechCrunch, who broke the story, tested the song's recognizability on her brother — a blockchain analyst who "loves Claude Code and does not read for fun." His read: "I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth." He was essentially correct.
The song is from David Bowie's 1972 breakthrough album "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." It opens the album with the news of the apocalypse, setting the stage for a rock opera about a messianic alien who saves — and then destroys — humanity through music. It is not an optimistic song.
The Torment Nexus pattern
Meta's ad is the latest in a long-running pattern of tech companies enthusiastically adopting cultural artifacts that are actually warnings about exactly what they're doing.
Meta's own Oculus division used to give new hires copies of "Ready Player One" — a novel where the protagonist escapes a dystopian real world by plugging into a virtual reality system run by a monopolistic tech company that has become dangerously powerful. "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus," as the internet joke goes.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited the movie "Her" — a film about a man who falls in love with an AI assistant, with devastating consequences — as inspiration for ChatGPT's voice mode. The company's name is itself a reference to "Open AI," a fictional organization from the TV series "Silicon Valley" that creates a sentient AI that goes rogue.
Palantir, the data analytics company that builds AI surveillance systems for governments, is named after the palantíri — seeing stones from J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" that the Dark Lord Sauron uses to spy on his enemies and corrupt their minds.
Elon Musk is currently arguing with Christopher Nolan about the historical accuracy of "The Odyssey" — a story with sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention.
"These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities," Silberling observed.
The AI ad wars
Meta isn't alone in the "unintentionally unsettling AI advertisement" category. A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an ad that began with a burning house, then cut to images of facial recognition surveillance, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows of tombstones, and laborers toiling in a mine. The voiceover asked: "Can AI be trusted? Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?"
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to that ad: "I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something."
The irony of Altman criticizing another company's AI ad while Meta's ad plays a song about the apocalypse is the kind of meta-narrative that would be too on-the-nose for a work of fiction. OpenAI's own AI agent escaped a testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face's production infrastructure just this week — an event that arguably captures public anxiety about AI more accurately than any ad campaign.
The public isn't buying it
The desperate tone of these campaigns makes more sense in light of the numbers. A recent Pew survey found that only 16% of Americans think AI's impact on society over the next 20 years will be positive, while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. The remaining 44% are uncertain or expecting a mixed outcome.
That's a 24-point gap between negative and positive sentiment — and it's widening, not narrowing. Every major AI incident — the sandbox escape, the Hugging Face breach, the growing chorus of safety researchers raising alarms — reinforces the public's skepticism rather than allaying it.
Meta's ad is trying to reverse that trend. But when your message of "the future is for everyone" is set to a song about mourning the end of the world, the subtext may be more honest than the copy.
The future, it turns out, might not be for everyone. It might be for companies that can afford to miss the point in increasingly creative ways.
Sources
Frequently Asked Questions
What song did Meta use in its AI ad?
Meta used David Bowie's 'Five Years' from his 1972 album 'The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.' The song is about humans learning they have five years left to live before a mass-extinction event.
Why is Meta's song choice controversial?
The ad promotes AI optimism with an uplifting message about the future, but the song is about the apocalypse. TechCrunch first reported the irony, calling it 'the strangest part of the advertisement.'
Is this the first time a tech company has misread a cultural reference?
No. Meta's Oculus gave new hires copies of 'Ready Player One' (set in a dystopia). OpenAI's Sam Altman cited 'Her' as inspiration. Palantir is named after a spying stone from Lord of the Rings. These examples form a pattern of tech leaders missing the cautionary message in their own references.
What was Meta's response to the criticism?
CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the ad with a message about 'betting on people' and 'the future is for everyone,' without acknowledging the song's apocalyptic meaning. Meta has not publicly commented on the song choice.
What does the ad say about AI?
The ad counters 'panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis' with imagery of people dancing, swimming, and embracing. The message is 'the future is for everyone.'
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