Meta’s New Feel-Good AI Ad Uses a Song About the End of the World

Thursday morning, Meta released the ad on its official Instagram account with the message artificial intelligence “they will not make us inconsistent” or “leave us behind.” It was based on the 1972 David Bowie track “Five Years,” which is about, among other things, the end of the world.

“Call us hopefuls, call us dreamers, call us whatever you want – but we’re betting on people, and we love it,” the narrator saysa toddler playing with a butterfly, two parents laughing with their baby, and Jalen Brunson surfing at the Knicks Championship Parade. (The advertiser also takes great care to present his events opposites smart glasses that don’t exist, say, harassing women and covertly draw it.)

The simple phrase “Five Years” used in advertising includes the following words:

I heard the phone calls, the theater, the music being played

I saw boys, toys, electronic devices and televisions

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no storage space

I had to collect a lot of things to keep everything in there

It’s all fat, thin people

It’s all tall, short people

And there is no one

And all people

I never thought I would need so many people

Perhaps understandably, it skips parts of the song, including the opening:

The story had just come
We had five years left to cry
The newsboy cried and told us
The world was really dying

Reached for comment, Meta spokesman Francis Brennan said he “wants to emphasize what David Bowie said about ‘Five Years’ and what it means: to have hope for the future.” Brennan posted a 1972 quote about a song that he from BowieBible.com.

“People are so fearful and fearful of the future that I would like to change that feeling in a different way, to hope,” the statement reads. which comes from NME Magazine. “If somebody can take the mickey out of the future, that’s what it’s going to be… it’s going to be an amazing piece of technology.”

However, BowieBible.com also stated that the song “talks about a terrible dystopian crisis in which the Earth enters its final five years, for unknown reasons, with fear, violence, and attempts at redemption.”

BowieBible.com also quotes a 2018 interview and drummer Mick Woodmansey: “Well, we talked about it, and we knew it was about the end of the world and the peacemakers,” Woodmansey said about the music. “I remember when we filmed it, he was in tears, and he was crying and he was crying.”

According to Jeremy D. Larson, vice president of Condé Nast’s sister publication Pitchfork, taking music out of business is the norm. They refer to a Carnival Cruise ad which uses an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction. (He also says that since Warner Chappell Music the owner Bowie’s book, and those who have a clue where his music ends up.)