On Thursday morning, social media giant Meta released a high-production advertisement on its official Instagram account, aimed at reframing the public narrative surrounding artificial intelligence as a force for human connection rather than isolation. The promotional video, which features a series of heartwarming vignettes of human life, explicitly states that AI will not make society less connected or leave individuals behind. However, the campaign has immediately drawn scrutiny and irony-laden critiques for its choice of background music: the 1972 David Bowie classic Five Years. While the song’s melody is sweeping and evocative, its lyrical content describes a harrowing countdown to the end of the world, creating what critics describe as a jarring disconnect between Meta’s message of technological optimism and the song’s apocalyptic themes.
The advertisement opens with a voiceover that adopts a defiant yet hopeful tone. 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 declares. As these words are spoken, the visual narrative shifts through scenes of a toddler playing with a butterfly, parents laughing with an infant, and New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson waving during a championship parade. A significant portion of the ad focuses on Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, portraying them as a tool for capturing spontaneous family moments rather than a device for surreptitious recording—a point of ongoing contention for privacy advocates.
The musical selection, Five Years, is the opening track of Bowie’s seminal album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The snippet used in the Meta ad highlights lyrics that list mundane human artifacts: 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. The song eventually builds to a crescendo with the refrain: I never thought I’d need so many people.
The Disconnect Between Lyric and Intent
While the selected lyrics focus on the sensory overload of human existence, the broader context of the song is significantly darker. The opening verses, omitted from the commercial, describe a global panic following the announcement that the Earth has only five years of existence remaining: News had just come over / We had five years left to cry in / News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying. The song is widely recognized in musicology as a study of desperation, social collapse, and the sudden, frantic appreciation for humanity that occurs only in the face of total annihilation.
The use of an end-of-the-world anthem to promote a technology that some critics fear poses an existential risk to human labor and social fabric has been labeled by some observers as either a massive oversight or a subtle, perhaps unintentional, admission of the technology’s disruptive power. Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director at Pitchfork, noted that Meta’s choice of this specific song, where the context for human connection is the apocalypse, appears either ignorant or insidious. Larson further suggested that hearing Bowie’s work—an artist who prioritized human creativity—used to promote AI feels specifically nonconsensual, regardless of the legal licensing involved.
Meta’s Defense and the Bowie Perspective
In response to inquiries regarding the song choice, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan defended the campaign by pointing to David Bowie’s own historical comments about the track. Brennan suggested that the song, despite its dark premise, was intended to evoke a sense of optimism for the future. He cited a 1972 quote from Bowie, sourced via BowieBible.com and originally published in NME Magazine, in which the artist stated: 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.
However, other historical accounts of the song’s creation paint a different picture. Mick Woodmansey, the drummer for Bowie’s band at the time, recalled in a 2018 interview that the recording session was profoundly emotional and depressing. According to Woodmansey, Bowie was in tears while performing the vocals because he was so moved by the song’s depiction of the end of the world. This duality—Bowie’s personal futurism versus the song’s literal narrative of doom—remains at the heart of the debate over the ad’s effectiveness.
The Economics of Legacy Music in Advertising
The appearance of Bowie’s music in a Silicon Valley ad campaign is a byproduct of the modern music industry’s licensing landscape. In 2022, the David Bowie estate sold the artist’s entire publishing catalog to Warner Chappell Music for an estimated $250 million. This deal granted the publisher the right to license Bowie’s songs for use in films, television, and commercials.
As Larson noted, taking songs out of context for commercial purposes is a long-standing tradition in the advertising world. He pointed to previous examples, such as Carnival Cruise Lines using Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life—a song explicitly about heroin addiction—to sell family vacations. In these instances, the "vibe" or melody of the song often takes precedence over the literal meaning of the lyrics, as corporations seek to leverage the nostalgic emotional resonance of classic tracks to build brand affinity.
A Pattern of High-Stakes Tech Marketing
Meta’s latest campaign is part of a broader trend among technology giants attempting to humanize artificial intelligence amid growing public skepticism. As AI companies face scrutiny over data privacy, copyright infringement, and the potential for mass job displacement, their marketing departments have pivoted toward "lofty" messaging that emphasizes hope and human potential.
Other recent examples include:
- Anthropic: The AI safety startup recently released an ad titled There’s hope in hard questions. The video begins with images of burning buildings and graveyards, asking who will "hit the brakes" on technology, before transitioning into images of families and nature to suggest that their AI (Claude) is built with human safety in mind.
- Google: During the 2024 Paris Olympics, Google aired an ad for its Gemini AI featuring a father using the tool to write a fan letter for his daughter to send to track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The ad was met with significant backlash, with critics arguing it encouraged parents to outsource their children’s creativity and personal expression to a machine.
- FTX: In one of the most infamous examples of tech hubris, the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX aired a Super Bowl ad in 2022 starring Larry David. The comedian played various characters throughout history dismissing inventions like the wheel and the lightbulb, ending with him dismissing FTX. The tagline, "Don’t be like Larry," urged viewers not to miss out on the next big thing. FTX filed for bankruptcy nine months later, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was subsequently convicted of massive fraud.
The Challenge of Selling Trust
For Meta, the stakes of this campaign are particularly high. The company is currently navigating a pivot from being a social media firm to a "metaverse" and AI-first organization. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently emphasized that the company is focused on giving every person the tools to reach their full potential. However, Meta continues to struggle with a "trust deficit" stemming from past controversies regarding data handling and the psychological impact of its platforms.
The use of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in the ad is a strategic move to normalize wearable AI. The glasses, which allow users to record video and interact with an AI assistant, have been criticized for their potential to facilitate "creep shots" and surreptitious surveillance. By showing the glasses in a wholesome family context, Meta is attempting to define the "proper" use case for the hardware before public perception is solidified by negative experiences.
Implications for the AI Narrative
The debate over the "Five Years" ad underscores a fundamental tension in the tech industry. Companies are selling a future that is "unbelievably technological," yet they are doing so by leaning heavily on the cultural artifacts of the past. By using a 50-year-old song to promote 21st-century algorithms, Meta is attempting to bridge the gap between the familiar and the unknown.
Market analysts suggest that these heavy-handed marketing attempts often backfire because they fail to address the core anxieties of the public. According to recent surveys on AI sentiment, a significant portion of the population remains concerned about the loss of human agency. When a corporation uses a song about the literal loss of the world to tell people that "everything will be fine," it risks reinforcing the very fears it seeks to alleviate.
As AI continues to integrate into daily life, the battle for the narrative will only intensify. Meta’s "optimism" campaign, soundtracked by a vision of the apocalypse, serves as a poignant reminder of the complexities involved in marketing a future that many are still struggling to understand. Whether the ad will be remembered as a masterclass in irony or a successful attempt to co-opt a cultural icon remains to be seen, but for now, the "five years" countdown has taken on a new, digital meaning.
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