Meta’s new feel-good AI ad features a song about the end of the world

thursday morning, Meta posted an ad on its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not “weaken our connections” or “leave us behind.” The song was adapted from the 1972 David Bowie song “Five Years,” which is about, among other things, the end of the world.

“Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like the odds,” the narrator says as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with a toddler, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks’ championship parade. (The ad takes special care to highlight controversial uses of smart glasses, such as harassing women while secretly recording them.)

The excerpt of “Five Years” used in the ad includes the following lyrics:

I heard the phone, I heard the opera house, I heard my favorite melody.

The boys, toys, iron, watched TV

My brain hurt like a warehouse and I couldn’t afford it.

I had to pack a lot of stuff to keep everything there

And all the fat people and the thin people

And all the tall and short people

and everyone no one

And all of someone’s people

I didn’t think we would need so many people.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, other parts of the song are skipped, including the opening.

The news had just come in.
We had five years left to cry.
A newsman told us through tears.
the earth was really on the verge of extinction

Asked for comment, Mehta’s publicist Frances Brennan said: “We would like to emphasize what David Bowie himself said about ‘Five Years’ and its meaning: that he is optimistic about the future.” Brennan submitted a 1972 quote about the song that he had obtained to BowieBible.com.

“People are incredibly serious and fearful about the future, so I want to turn that feeling into a wave of optimism,” the quote is from NME Magazine. “If we could take Mickey out of the future, what would it be like?…It would be incredible technology.”

Nevertheless, BowieBible.com also points out that the song “talks about the dystopian nightmare that Earth enters into its final five years, for reasons that are not revealed, and the ensuing panic, violence, and attempts at redemption.”

BowieBible.com also cited a quote from a 2018 interview with drummer Mick Woodmansey, in which Woodmansey said of the song, “Well, we talked about this song and we knew it was an end-of-the-world kind of thing and it was pretty depressing.” “I remember he was really crying when we recorded it. He was doing the vocals and he was actually crying.”

Jeremy D. Larson, associate director of Condé Nast’s sister publication Pitchfork, said taking songs out of context for commercials is a long-standing tradition. He pointed to a Carnival Cruise ad that used an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction. (He also notes that Warner Chappell Music owns Bowie’s catalog, so they have discretion over where his songs end up.)