Meta’s up-to-date 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.” The song was David Bowie’s 1972 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 focus on people and we like these chances.” – says the narratoras a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks championship parade. (The ad specifically highlights the exploit of controversial intelligent glasses that, say, don’t harass women while secretly recording them.)

The fragment of the song “Five Years” used in the ad contains the following lyrics:

I heard telephones, opera, favorite melodies

I saw boys, toys, electric irons and televisions

My brain hurt like a warehouse, there was no free space in it

I had to cram a lot of stuff to fit everything in there

And all the fat, skinny people

And all the high and brief people

And all people are nothing

And all the “someone” people

I never thought I would need so many people

Perhaps it’s understandable that he omits other parts of the song, including the beginning:

The news has just arrived
We have five years left to cry
The journalist cried and told us
The earth was really dying

When asked for comment, Meta spokesman Francis Brennan said he “would like to emphasize what David Bowie himself said about ‘Five Years’ and what it means: optimism for the future.” Brennan sent a quote from 1972 about the song himself source: BowieBible.com.

“People are so incredibly serious and afraid of the future that I would like to reverse this feeling, turn it into a wave of optimism,” the quote reads. which itself comes from NME magazine. “If we can get Micky out of the future and what it’s going to be like… It’s going to be incredibly technological.”

Nevertheless, BowieBible.com also notes that the song “is about a dystopian nightmare in which Earth, for undisclosed reasons, enters its final five years, and the ensuing panic, violence, and attempts at redemption.”

BowieBible.com also quotes: Interview from 2018 with drummer Mick Woodmansey: “Well, we talked about it and we knew it was about the end of the world and it was quite depressing,” Woodmansey said of the song. “I remember when we were recording it, he was actually crying. He was singing the vocals and he was actually crying.”

According to Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director of Condé Nast’s sister publication, Pitchfork, taking songs out of context in ads is a time-honored tradition. He points to A Advertisement for a carnival cruise which uses an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction. (He’s also been saying this since Warner Chappell Music has in Bowie’s catalog, they have the freedom to decide where his songs go.)