Meta's upbeat AI ad is set to a song about the end of the world, and almost nobody noticed

Key points

• Meta released a new AI optimism ad featuring the David Bowie song "Five Years," which is explicitly about humanity learning it has five years left before extinction.
• Only 16% of Americans told Pew Research they think AI will have a positive impact on society over the next 20 years, as of recent polling.
• Anthropic also released its own AI trust ad recently, featuring burning houses, cemetery rows and surveillance imagery.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly mocked the Anthropic ad, calling it something he "thought was satire."
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally shared the ad alongside a message about AI benefits being "distributed to everyone."

Meta wants you to feel good about artificial intelligence. Its new promotional video opens in black and white, showing someone scrolling through scary headlines, then bursts into colour as smiling faces, dancing couples and laughing teenagers take over the screen. The voiceover promises the future is for everyone.

The song playing underneath all of this is "Five Years" by David Bowie.

If you do not know that track, here is the short version: it is about humanity discovering it has exactly five years before a mass extinction event wipes out the planet. The lyrics include lines like "Earth was really dying" and "we had five years left to cry in." It is not a song about hope. It is a song about collective panic before the end.

Meta picked the section of the song where Bowie repeats the word "people" many times. Stripped of context, it sounds uplifting. With context, it sounds like the voiceover at the end of a disaster film.

Mark Zuckerberg shared the ad himself, writing that Meta is "focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential." Nobody in the approval chain appears to have flagged the music choice, first reported by TechCrunch AI.

Why does this keep happening?

Meta is not alone. Tech companies have a long, well-documented habit of reaching for cultural references that undercut their own message.

A short tour of the evidence: Meta's Oculus division used to give new employees the novel "Ready Player One" as a welcome gift. That book is set in a dystopia where a VR tech company turns evil and oppressive. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has cited the film "Her" as an inspiration for his work; that film is a cautionary story about the emotional damage that comes from relying on AI companionship. Palantir, a company that builds AI surveillance tools for governments, took its name from a seeing stone in "Lord of the Rings" that the villain uses to spy on enemies.

The pattern has a name on the internet: building the Torment Nexus. The joke is that every cautionary tale in science fiction eventually becomes a product pitch.

Should you read anything into this?

Probably not a conspiracy. Almost certainly a gap between the people who choose soundtracks and the people who know their Bowie.

But the timing is awkward. Pew Research found that 40% of Americans expect AI to have a negative impact on society over the next 20 years, while just 16% expect a positive one. The ads are meant to shift those numbers. So far, the evidence suggests they are not working.

Anthropics's own recent trust-building ad featured a burning house, tombstones and surveillance cameras, with a voiceover asking "who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" Altman called it something he "thought was satire."

Two of the world's best-funded AI companies, spending serious money to reassure the public, and both managed to produce ads that feel more like warnings than invitations.

The one honest takeaway: If a company is spending this much energy trying to convince you its technology is safe and good for you, the useful question to ask is not whether the ad is pretty. It is what the company is actually building, and who is paying for it.