According to a report by WIRED magazine, tech giant Meta published a new advertisement video on its official Instagram account on Thursday morning. The central message of the ad is that artificial intelligence will not make humans less connected to one another or leave them behind. However, the musical selection accompanying this optimistic video has raised many eyebrows: the song chosen to accompany the campaign is "Five Years" by musician David Bowie from 1972, a track that describes, among other things, the end of humanity and the end of the world.
Meta’s Ad and the Use of the Song's Lyrics
During the new commercial, the narrator addresses the viewers, saying: "Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want — but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds." While the narrator reads these lines, various intimate and human scenes are displayed on the screen: a small toddler playing with a butterfly, two happy parents laughing together with their infant, and basketball player Jalen Brunson waving to the crowd during the New York Knicks Championship Parade. In addition, the advertisement takes care to highlight different use cases for Meta's controversial smart glasses, ensuring it shows uses that do not include, for example, harassing women or surreptitiously recording them without their knowledge.
The snippet of "Five Years" used in the commercial 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."
As is clearly evident, the advertisement skips other parts of the song, particularly its famously grim opening:
"News had just come over / We had five years left to cry in / News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying."
Meta’s Response and the Historical Interpretation of Bowie’s Song
When WIRED journalists reached out for an official comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan sought to emphasize what David Bowie himself had said in the past about "Five Years" and its deep meaning, which Brennan argued expresses optimism for the future. Brennan sent the reporter a 1972 quote attributed to Bowie, which he sourced from the website "BowieBible.com". In that quote, originally published in the British music magazine NME Magazine, Bowie said: "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."
Despite this argument by the Meta spokesperson, BowieBible.com itself 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." The website also provides a quote from a 2018 interview with Mick Woodmansey, Bowie's former band drummer, who recalled working on the song in the studio: "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, Bowie was literally crying in the studio. He performed his vocals and he was actually shedding tears and weeping over the situation."
The Advertising Industry and Taking Songs Out of Context
According to Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director of the music magazine Pitchfork (which belongs to Condé Nast, the parent company of WIRED), using popular songs out of their original context for commercial advertisements is a long-standing tradition in the advertising industry. As an example, he points to a Carnival Cruise advertisement, which chose to use a song by singer Iggy Pop that is actually about a severe heroin addiction. Larson adds that since Warner Chappell Music owns the catalog of David Bowie's songs and compositions, it is the entity that holds the right and discretion to determine on which platforms and in which commercials the late artist's songs will be integrated.
"Meta choosing this specific song where the context for human connection is the apocalypse and the end of the world seems either really ignorant or really insidious," Larson told WIRED in a conversation they held via the Slack application. "I don't know, maybe in that context it's genius." Larson added his personal feeling about the move: "Hearing Bowie's work used to promote artificial intelligence feels specifically and uniquely nonconsensual."
On the other hand, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a post on social media referring to the new advertisement, writing that the company is "focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone."
Tech Giants' Attempts to Allay AI Fears
Over the past few years, leading tech companies have made several dramatic and rather strained attempts to allay public fears that their technologies are making the world a worse and more alienated place. Just a few weeks before Meta's ad, Anthropic released its own advertisement titled "There’s hope in hard questions." The Anthropic ad opens with a grim shot of a burning building and asks viewers: "Who's going to hit the brakes if we need to?", while showing dozens of graves in a cemetery on the screen. Only later does the tone of the ad gradually shift in a more optimistic and comforting direction, ending with general and vague questions like "What if we started to be more human again?" against the backdrop of warm family photos and a shot of a large humpback whale in the sea.
In 2024, search giant Google released an ad that drew mixed reactions and much public embarrassment, focusing on a father teaching his young daughter, an aspiring athlete, how to run hurdles. The father decides to use the company's AI tool, Gemini, to draft a well-written letter on her behalf so that she can send it to the decorated and famous hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
Another prominent example of this type of marketing attempt occurred during the 2022 Super Bowl, when the FTX cryptocurrency exchange broadcasted a now-notorious ad starring actor and creator Larry David. In the ad, Larry David played various historical figures who dismiss useful inventions throughout human history—such as the toilet, the fork, and the lightbulb—before ultimately dismissing the FTX crypto platform itself. "Don’t be like Larry," read the text overlay on the closing slide of the ad. "Don’t miss out on crypto, NFTs, and the next big thing." As it turned out in retrospect, FTX filed for bankruptcy only about nine months after that advertisement was broadcast.
According to the article in WIRED, it is completely clear why tech companies feel the need to use every marketing tool at their disposal to try and boost public goodwill and user sentiment toward them. However, these advertising campaigns also demonstrate that many tech companies are failing to sell products that independently convince people, without the need for sophisticated commercials, that they are not actively working to make the world a worse place.