Meta’s newest advertisement opens in black and white with a close-up of an eye, showing someone reading a stream of panicked headlines about artificial intelligence taking jobs, isolating people, and triggering a global crisis. A voiceover says: “Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind. We couldn’t disagree more.”
The footage suddenly shifts to color and depicts different people opening their eyes and smiling. The ad shows a couple dancing on a rooftop pointing at a rainbow, a group of teens swimming in a lake, a child running in a field, and friends embracing after time apart. The narrator continues: “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 future is for everyone.”
That optimistic line is convenient for a company staking hundreds of billions on the idea that AI will transform humanity. The oddest element of the spot, however, is not the social-feed style presentation of happy moments — it is that the soundtrack is David Bowie’s song “Five Years.”
The meaning of “Five Years” To listeners unfamiliar with the track, the excerpt used in the ad might sound uplifting and match the clip’s tone, especially since the chosen section repeats the word “people.” But the lines immediately before the excerpt make the song’s subject clear: it depicts humanity reacting to news that there are only five years left before a mass-extinction event. The lyrics include: “News had just come over / We had five years left to cry in / News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying.” Those lines are bleak rather than reassuring.
Using a song about the end of the world to calm viewers that AI will make the world better is a contradictory choice, and that contradiction appears to have gone unnoticed at Meta, including by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg wrote alongside the video: “Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want. 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.”
Tech leaders and cultural references Tech leaders are not always known for their literary sensitivity. Meta’s Oculus once gave new hires copies of the science fiction novel Ready Player One, which is set in a dystopia where a virtual-reality company becomes overly powerful. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has cited inspiration from the movie Her, which warns of pitfalls when AI is used for emotional support. The company Palantir takes its name from a “seeing stone” in The Lord of the Rings — a device used to spy on enemies. Elon Musk has publicly complained about the “accuracy” of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey. Alex Blechman highlighted similar incongruities in a November 8, 2021, tweet.
Other AI companies’ uneasy ads Meta is not the only company producing jarring promotional material. Anthropic released an unsettling video a few weeks earlier. As described by my colleague Lucas Ropek, that ad begins with footage of a burning house before switching to still images showing crowds being surveilled with facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appear to be laborers in a mine extracting raw materials for smartphones. A voice-over in that piece poses questions such as, “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”
Anthropic’s intent seems to be to signal that it understands AI’s societal risks and therefore can be trusted to develop it responsibly. The ad’s mood, however, comes across as closer to the unease and dread of Bowie’s “Five Years.”
Responses and public opinion OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reacted to Anthropic’s ad on Twitter on July 14, 2026, writing: “I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.”
Despite these companies’ efforts to shape public perception of AI, they have made limited headway. A recent Pew Research survey found that just 16% of Americans expect AI’s impact on society over the next 20 years to be positive, while 40% expect it to be negative.
Conclusion Meta’s “the future is for everyone” message and the ad’s joyful imagery sit uneasily alongside its choice of an apocalyptic David Bowie song. Along with similarly discordant ads from other AI firms, the spot underscores that tech companies still struggle to find an appropriate tone while public sentiment about AI remains wary or pessimistic.
