Meta AI ad pairs upbeat message with David Bowie’s apocalyptic ‘Five Years’

The new Meta AI ad is meant to sell optimism about artificial intelligence, and that makes its soundtrack a strange choice for investors watching how the company is pitching its AI future. The spot uses David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a song centered on humanity finding out it has five years left before an extinction-level catastrophe.

Meta posted the video on Facebook, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed it as part of the company’s broader message that AI should be available to everyone. For shareholders, the ad is less about a single creative decision and more about how Meta is trying to shape public trust around technology it is investing heavily in.

The ad opens in black and white with a close-up of an eye and a stream of anxious headlines about AI taking jobs, isolating people and causing a wider crisis. A narrator says some people believe AI will make people feel less connected or leave them behind, then says Meta disagrees.

The commercial then switches to color and shows people smiling, dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow, swimming in a lake, running through a field and greeting friends. The narrator says Meta is “betting on people” and ends with the line, “The future is for everyone.”

What song is in Meta’s AI ad?

The song in Meta’s AI ad is David Bowie’s “Five Years.” TechCrunch noted that the portion used in the commercial repeats the word “people,” which can sound uplifting without the rest of the lyrics.

The full song carries a very different meaning. Its lyrics describe news that Earth is dying and that people have five years left, with the public reacting in panic and grief. In plain terms, the commercial uses a song about the end of the world to support a message that AI will help bring people together.

Zuckerberg wrote alongside the video that Meta has long believed in giving people power to “share, connect, and shape your world” and said that, as AI enters its next phase, Meta wants to give people tools to reach their potential while distributing technology’s benefits broadly.

The tension is familiar in tech marketing: companies are trying to argue that AI can be safe, useful and broadly beneficial at the same time many consumers worry about jobs, trust and social effects. AI, or artificial intelligence, refers to software systems that can perform tasks such as generating text, images, code or recommendations based on patterns in data.

Meta is not the only AI company using dramatic imagery in recent advertising. TechCrunch’s Lucas Ropek described a recent Anthropic ad as opening with a burning house and showing images including facial recognition surveillance, a person sleeping on the street, cemetery tombstones and laborers in a mine. The ad’s voiceover included questions such as whether AI can be trusted and who would “hit the brakes” if needed.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reacted to Anthropic’s ad on X by saying he thought it was satire and looked for signs that the Claude account name had been altered. Anthropic’s Claude account had posted the ad with the line, “There’s hope in hard questions.”

The public mood remains a challenge for AI companies. A Pew survey cited by TechCrunch found that 16% of Americans expect AI to have a positive effect on society over the next 20 years, while 40% expect a negative effect. Meta’s ad shows the company trying to pull that perception toward optimism, even if its Bowie cue sends a mixed signal.

This story draws on original reporting from TechCrunch.