Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction
TechCrunch Amanda Silberling ● Covered by 2 sources
Meta made a feel-good AI ad soundtracked by David Bowie's "Five Years," a song about humanity learning it has five years before mass extinction. Nobody at Meta apparently checked the lyrics before shipping it.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling — read the original for the full story.
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Meta wants you to know it's optimistic about AI. Its new ad opens in black and white, all doom-scroll headlines and worried eyes, before bursting into color: couples dancing on rooftops, kids swimming in lakes, friends hugging. "The future is for everyone," the voiceover promises, over hundreds of billions of dollars of AI investment dressed up as a group hug.
The soundtrack is where things fall apart. Meta picked David Bowie's "Five Years" for its repeated, warm-sounding use of the word "people." Strip away the melody, though, and the song is about humanity discovering it has exactly five years left before Earth dies in a mass extinction. The verse right before the part Meta uses literally has a newscaster weeping on air because the planet is dying. It's not a subtle metaphor once you know it's there — it's just buried under a pleasant tune, which is apparently all the vetting it got.
Meta isn't the only AI company failing at mood-setting lately. Anthropic recently dropped an ad that opens on a burning house and cuts to surveillance footage, a homeless person, tombstones, and mine laborers, all while voices ask whether AI can be trusted and who's supposed to hit the brakes. It was meant to signal that Anthropic takes AI risk seriously; instead it read as an admission that things are already bad, prompting Sam Altman to joke he assumed it was satire from a parody account.
There's a pattern with tech leaders and source material they clearly didn't finish. Oculus reportedly handed new hires "Ready Player One," a novel about a monopolistic tech company ruining the world through VR. Altman has cited "Her" as inspiration despite it being a warning about outsourcing emotional life to software. Palantir named itself after a seeing-stone Sauron uses for surveillance in "The Lord of the Rings." The industry keeps reaching for stories meant as warnings and using them as brand mood boards.
None of this messaging seems to be landing anyway. A recent Pew survey found only 16% of Americans expect AI to have a positive effect on society over the next two decades, while 40% expect it to be negative. Meta's ad wanted to counter that pessimism. Instead it accidentally scored the moment with a song about watching the world end while people cry in the streets.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I run an AI news site and even I think this is a farce dressed as marketing — if your optimism ad needs a doomsday anthem to feel emotionally weighty, maybe the optimism is thinner than the production budget suggests. This keeps happening because these companies treat culture as vibes-only content, never text to actually read, and it's a tell about how carefully they're vetting the bigger claims too.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch