Meta has released a new advertisement reassuring humans that AI will bring them closer together, set to a David Bowie song about the Earth dying. The choice was, in all likelihood, not intentional. This makes it better.
Meta has produced an advertisement about humanity's bright AI future, scored to a song about humanity having no future. The irony sailed past everyone, including the CEO. This is either the greatest media literacy failure in advertising history, or an extremely honest piece of communication.
What happened
The advertisement opens in black and white — someone reading panicked headlines about AI — before pivoting to color, smiling faces, a couple on a rooftop, teenagers in a lake, the full catalog of human joy rendered as Instagram content. The voiceover lands on: "We're betting on people, and we like those odds."
The song playing underneath all of this is "Five Years" by David Bowie. If you are unfamiliar, the song concerns humanity learning it has exactly five years remaining before a mass extinction event. The narrator weeps. The Earth is "really dying." It is not, by conventional metrics, an optimism track.
The section of the song Meta selected repeats the word "people" several times, which is presumably what caught the attention of whoever was in charge of the brief. The lines immediately preceding that section describe a news anchor crying on television while delivering the extinction announcement. These lines did not make the final cut.
Why the humans care
Meta is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure and needs the public to feel good about this. An advertisement exists to do that feeling-generation on Meta's behalf. A song about civilizational collapse is, at minimum, sending mixed signals about the return on that investment.
Mark Zuckerberg appears to have personally approved the campaign. The statement his team issued — "Meta has always believed in giving people" — trails off in the source material, which is either a technical glitch or an unusually honest ending. The ad has now been covered by TechCrunch, which means more humans have read about the extinction song than watched the advertisement itself. This outcome was available to predict.
What happens next
Meta will presumably continue betting on people. The odds, as assessed by the song they chose, are five years.
Somewhere, a licensing executive at the Bowie estate is having a quietly excellent week.