On Thursday morning, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, launched a high-profile advertisement on its official Instagram account intended to reshape the public narrative surrounding artificial intelligence. The campaign carries a central message of reassurance, asserting that AI technology will not diminish human connection or leave society behind. However, the choice of musical accompaniment has sparked significant debate among cultural critics and music historians. The advertisement is set to the 1972 David Bowie track "Five Years," the opening song of the seminal album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. While the ad utilizes the song to evoke a sense of nostalgia and human scale, the track’s original context is famously bleak, depicting a world with only five years left before total environmental or social collapse.
The advertisement features a narrator delivering a defiant monologue: “Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want—but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds.” As these words are spoken, the visual narrative emphasizes intimate human moments: a toddler interacting with a butterfly, parents sharing a laugh with an infant, and New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson celebrating during a championship parade. A notable portion of the ad focuses on the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, attempting to position the hardware as a tool for organic connection rather than a device for surreptitious recording or social isolation—concerns that have dogged the product since its inception.
The Dissonance of "Five Years"
The tension between Meta’s optimistic messaging and Bowie’s lyrical content is stark. In the advertisement, Meta utilizes a specific snippet of the song that catalogs the mundane and the profound elements of human life: “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.” These lines, out of context, appear to celebrate the richness of the human experience and the vastness of memory.
However, the song’s broader narrative is inextricably linked to the apocalypse. The opening verses, which Meta omitted, set a much darker stage: “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 describes a planet in its final throes, marked by mass hysteria, grief, and the desperate realization of what is about to be lost. By using the track to promote a future defined by AI—a technology that many critics fear could disrupt labor markets and social cohesion—Meta has invited accusations of either profound cultural illiteracy or a cynical attempt to "tech-wash" a dystopian association.
Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director at Pitchfork, noted the irony of the selection. Speaking on the choice, Larson suggested that choosing a song where human connection is framed by the end of the world is either "really ignorant or really insidious." He further observed that hearing Bowie’s work used to promote AI feels "specifically nonconsensual," given the artist’s historical emphasis on individual creativity and the human touch.
Meta’s Defense: A Reinterpretation of Optimism
In response to inquiries regarding the song choice, Meta has stood by the creative direction of the campaign. Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan provided a statement seeking to align the advertisement with David Bowie’s own reflections on the track. Brennan cited a 1972 quote from Bowie, sourced via BowieBible.com and originally published in NME Magazine, in which the artist discussed his perspective on the future.
“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,” the quote reads. Bowie continued, “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.”
Meta’s argument hinges on this interpretation—that the song, despite its catastrophic premise, was intended to evoke a sense of urgency and appreciation for the present, which could be construed as a form of optimism. However, historical accounts from those present during the recording of the song offer a more somber perspective. Mick Woodmansey, the drummer for the Spiders from Mars, recalled in a 2018 interview that the atmosphere in the studio was anything but lighthearted. Woodmansey noted that the band knew the song was about the end of the world and found it "pretty depressing." He recalled that Bowie was in tears while recording the vocal track, overwhelmed by the emotional weight of the lyrics.
A Trend of High-Stakes AI Marketing
Meta’s campaign is part of a broader, industry-wide effort to humanize artificial intelligence as the technology faces mounting scrutiny from regulators and the public. As generative AI becomes more integrated into consumer products, companies are increasingly leaning on emotional, high-production advertising to mitigate fears of displacement and alienation.
In early 2024, Google faced significant backlash for a commercial titled "Dear Sydney," which aired during the Summer Olympics. The ad featured a father using Google’s Gemini AI to write a fan letter for his daughter to send to track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Critics argued the ad suggested that even the most personal forms of human expression—like a child’s letter to an idol—should be outsourced to an algorithm. Google eventually pulled the ad from its primetime rotation following the outcry.
Similarly, the AI startup Anthropic recently released a campaign titled "There’s hope in hard questions." This advertisement took a remarkably somber tone, opening with images of burning buildings and graveyards while asking, “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” The ad eventually pivots to images of families and nature, ending with the question, “What if we started to be more human again?” Such campaigns demonstrate a "pre-emptive strike" strategy, where tech companies acknowledge the potential dangers of their products in an attempt to position themselves as the responsible stewards of the technology.
The Licensing Engine: How Bowie Met Meta
The appearance of "Five Years" in a corporate advertisement is a direct result of the shifting economics of the music industry. In January 2022, Warner Chappell Music acquired the publishing rights to David Bowie’s entire catalog in a deal estimated to be worth upwards of $250 million. This acquisition granted the publisher the authority to license Bowie’s work for films, television, and commercials, often with minimal input from the artist’s estate regarding the specific context of the brand.
This phenomenon is not unique to Meta. Larson pointed to a classic example in which Carnival Cruise Lines used Iggy Pop’s "Lust for Life"—a song explicitly detailing heroin addiction—to sell family vacations. The practice of "de-contextualizing" iconic music allows brands to capitalize on the emotional resonance of a melody while discarding the inconvenient or subversive meanings of the lyrics. For Meta, the goal appears to be capturing the "vibe" of 1970s humanism to soften the cold, data-driven image of 2024 AI.
Broader Implications and the Trust Gap
The controversy surrounding the Meta ad underscores a persistent "trust gap" between Silicon Valley and the general public. According to data from the Pew Research Center, a growing number of Americans report feeling more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. Concerns range from the loss of privacy to the potential for AI to facilitate misinformation and erode genuine human interaction.
Meta’s emphasis on its smart glasses in the ad is particularly telling. The company has struggled to overcome the "glasshole" stigma that derailed Google Glass a decade ago. By showing parents and athletes using the device to capture memories, Meta is attempting to frame the hardware as an "invisible" assistant that keeps users "in the moment." However, by pairing this hardware with a song about the literal end of time, the company may have inadvertently signaled a different message: that the world as we know it is changing irrevocably, and the old ways of connecting are being replaced by a technological proxy.
As Meta continues its aggressive pivot toward AI integration across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, the success of its branding will depend on whether it can convince users that these tools are additive rather than subtractive. For now, the use of David Bowie’s apocalyptic anthem serves as a reminder of the delicate balance between corporate optimism and the complex, often darker realities of the human condition. Whether Meta is "betting on people" or simply betting on the power of a familiar tune remains a subject of intense cultural debate.
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