Meta’s New Feel-Good AI Ad Uses a Song About the World Ending
On Thursday morning, Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not “make us less connected” or “leave us behind.” It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track…
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On Thursday morning, Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not “make us less connected” or “leave us behind.” It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track “Five Years,” which is about, among other things, the end of the world.
“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 narrator says , as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks Championship Parade. (The ad also takes special care to highlight use cases for its controversial smart glasses that are not, say, harassing women while surreptitiously recording them.)
The snippet of “Five Years” used in the ad includes the following lyrics:
I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
Perhaps understandably, it skips other parts of the song, including the opening:
News had just come over We had five years left to cry in News guy wept and told us Earth was really dying
When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said that he “would like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about ‘Five Years’ and its meaning: having optimism for the future.” Brennan sent along a 1972 quote about the song that he sourced to BowieBible.com .
“People are so incredibly serious and scared of the future that I would wish to turn the feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism,” reads the quote, which is itself sourced from NME Magazine . “If one can take the micky out of the future, and what it is going to be like … It’s going to be unbelievably technological.”
Nevertheless, BowieBible.com also notes that the song “speaks of a dystopian nightmare in which Earth enters its final five years, for reasons undisclosed, and the ensuing panic, violence, and attempts at redemption.”
BowieBible.com also quotes from a 2018 interview with drummer Mick Woodmansey: “Well, we chatted about it, and we knew it was about the end of the world and pretty depressing,” Woodmansey said of the song. “I remember when we recorded it, he was actually in tears. He was doing the vocal and he was actually crying.”
Source: Wired