Meta’s new Feel-Good AI ad uses a song about the end of the world

On Thursday morning, Meta posted an ad on its official Instagram account with the message that AI will not “make us less connected” or “leave us behind.” It is set to David Bowie’s 1972 song “Five Years,” which is about the end of the world, among other things.

“Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever you want — but we bet people, and we like those odds,” the narrator says, as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves in a Knicks championship parade. (The ad also takes special care to highlight the use cases for the controversial smart glasses, which don’t harass women while surreptitiously recording, for example.)

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

I heard the phones, the opera house and favorite tunes

I saw boys, toys, electric irons, and televisions

My mind ached like a warehouse, and it didn’t have any more room

I had to cram a lot of things in to store everything in there

And all fat and thin people

And all tall and short people

And all the people are nobody

And everyone

I never thought I would need so many people

Perhaps understandably, he skips other parts of the song, including the opening:

The news has just come
We have five years left to cry
The news guy cried and told us
The Earth was truly dying

When contacted for comment, Meta spokesman Francis Brennan said he “would like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about ‘five years’ and its meaning: optimism for the future.” Brennan sent a 1972 quote about the song’s source material to BowieBible.com.

The quote, which comes from NME magazine, reads: “People are so serious and afraid of the future that I want to turn that feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism.” “If one could take the mickey out of the future, what it would be like…it would be incredibly technological.”

However, BowieBible.com also notes that the song “is about a dystopian nightmare in which, for reasons yet to be revealed, the Earth enters its final five years, and the panic, violence, and attempts at redemption that follow.”

BowieBible.com also quotes a 2018 interview with drummer Mick Woodmansee: “Well, we talked about it, and we knew it was about the end of the world and it’s very depressing,” Woodmansee said of the song. “I remember when we recorded it, he was actually crying. He was singing it and he was actually crying.”

According to Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director of Condé Nast’s sister magazine Pitchfork, taking songs out of the context of commercials is a time-honored tradition. Refers to the Carnival Cruise ad that uses Iggy Pop’s song about heroin addiction. (He also says that because Warner Chappell Music owns Bowie’s catalog, they have discretion over where his songs end up.)