Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction | TechCrunch
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AI
Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction
Amanda Silberling
9:28 AM PDT · July 23, 2026
Meta’s newest advertisement begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis.
"Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind," a voiceover says. "We couldn’t disagree more."
Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart.
"Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds," the voiceover says. "The future is for everyone."
That’s a nice sentiment — as well as pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we’re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It’s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song "Five Years."
If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen, read the lyrics, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother — a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun — if he could tell me what the song is about.
"I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth," he told me. He is correct. It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass-extinction event in five years.
Image Credits: Texts from my brother, a consenting participant in this literary experiment
If you’re not familiar with Bowie’s music, this track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad’s upbeat tone. The part of the song that is used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it uses the word "people" over and over again, and without the context of the song, it’s not clear what it’s about.
But if we look at the lines directly preceding this section:
News had just come over<br>We had five years left to cry in<br>News guy wept and told us<br>Earth was really dying<br>Cried so much his face was wet<br>Then I knew he was not lying
We "had five years left to cry in" and the "earth was really dying." It’s pretty bleak.
It is not reassuring to convince people that AI is going to make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world, and yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want," he wrote alongside the video. "As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone. We’re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone."
Then again, tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills. Meta’s Oculus used to give new hires copies of the science fiction novel "Ready Player One," which is set in a dystopia in which a tech company making virtual reality products becomes overly powerful and evil. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited inspiration from the movie "Her," which warns us about what can go wrong when we use AI for emotional support. Palantir, a company that builds AI surveillance systems for the government, is named after Palantir, a seeing stone from the "Lord of the Rings" franchise that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. Elon Musk is currently throwing a fit about the "accuracy" of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of "The Odyssey," a story with such realistic elements as sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention. These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities.
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