The new Meta David Bowie ad is trying to reassure people that artificial intelligence will help them connect, then scores the pitch with a song about humanity staring down the end of the world. Meta posted the spot Thursday morning on its official Instagram account, according to WIRED.
The ad argues that AI will not make people more isolated or leave them behind. Over images including a toddler with a butterfly, parents with a baby, and Jalen Brunson at a Knicks Championship Parade, a narrator says Meta is “betting on people.” The company also uses the spot to show benign uses for its smart glasses, a product line WIRED has reported has drawn concern over recording people without their knowledge and related harassment.
The music choice is the part that does the most work, and also creates the obvious problem. Meta used David Bowie’s 1972 track “Five Years,” from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The excerpt in the ad includes lines about telephones, opera houses, TVs, a brain overloaded “like a warehouse,” and Bowie singing that he “never thought I’d need so many people.”
The ad does not use the song’s opening lines, where a news broadcast announces that Earth has five years left and that the planet is dying. That context makes the ad’s human-connection pitch feel less like a clean sync and more like somebody approved the vibe without reading the lyrics sheet. Very Silicon Valley, very avoidable.
Why is Meta using a David Bowie song in an AI ad?
Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan told WIRED the company wanted to point to Bowie’s own description of the song as tied to optimism about the future. Brennan cited a 1972 Bowie quote, collected by BowieBible.com and originally sourced to NME Magazine, in which Bowie said people were scared of the future and that he wanted to turn that fear “into a wave of optimism.”
That defense has a paper trail, though it is not the whole paper trail. BowieBible.com also describes “Five Years” as a song about a dystopian scenario in which Earth has only five years remaining, followed by panic, violence, and attempts at redemption. The site also quotes drummer Mick Woodmansey saying in a 2018 interview that the band understood the song as being about the end of the world and “pretty depressing,” and that Bowie cried while recording the vocal.
Who controls where Bowie songs appear?
Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director of Pitchfork, told WIRED that using songs against their original context in commercials is an old advertising habit. He pointed to a Carnival Cruise ad that used an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction.
Larson also told WIRED that Warner Chappell Music owns Bowie’s catalog and therefore has discretion over licensing placements. Pitchfork reported in 2022 that Warner Chappell had acquired Bowie’s catalog for $250 million.
Larson was sharply critical of the fit. He told WIRED that choosing a song where human connection is framed by apocalypse seemed “really ignorant or really insidious,” while allowing that the context might make it “genius.” He added that hearing Bowie’s work attached to AI felt “especially and specifically nonconsensual.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted about the ad on Facebook, writing that the company is focused on giving people tools to reach their potential and on distributing the benefits of technology to everyone.
Tech ads keep trying to calm people down
Meta is not alone in making a grand, sentimental argument for controversial technology. WIRED noted that Anthropic recently released an ad called “There’s hope in hard questions,” which opens with a burning building and graves before shifting toward images of families and a whale. Google’s 2024 Gemini ad showed a father using the chatbot to draft a message from his daughter to hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. FTX’s 2022 Super Bowl ad had Larry David dismissing inventions throughout history before warning viewers not to miss crypto and NFTs. FTX filed for bankruptcy about nine months later.
Tech companies can buy licensed music, cinematic montages, and narrators with conviction. The harder sell is persuading people that the products themselves justify all that optimism.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
