Meta released an AI optimism advertisement on July 23, 2026, scored to David Bowie's 'Five Years,' a 1972 song about the human race panicking after learning Earth will die in a mass-extinction event. The spot opens on a black-and-white eye scanning grim AI headlines before shifting to color footage of people dancing, swimming, and embracing, all filtered through Instagram posts. Mark Zuckerberg promoted the ad on his own Instagram the same day.
The voiceover leans directly into the backlash against AI: it names the fear that AI will make people feel less connected and rejects it. The tagline lands on 'The future is for everyone.'
The song choice is the problem. The section of 'Five Years' used in the ad repeats the word 'people,' which reads as uplifting divorced from context. The lyrics immediately preceding that section describe a news anchor weeping as he tells the world Earth is dying and there are five years left to cry in.
Key facts
- 01Meta's new AI ad, published July 23, 2026, is scored to David Bowie's 'Five Years,' a song about humanity learning it has five years before mass extinction.
- 02Only 16% of Americans believe AI's impact on society over the next 20 years will be positive, per a recent Pew survey.
- 0340% of Americans expect AI to have a negative impact on society over the same 20-year window.
- 04Mark Zuckerberg promoted the ad on Instagram, framing AI as the next wave of Meta's mission to connect people.
- 05Anthropic released its own ominous AI ad on July 14, 2026, prompting OpenAI's Sam Altman to publicly mistake it for satire.
It is a strange soundtrack for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will remake human life. Meta did not flag the mismatch, and neither did Zuckerberg, who paired the video with a post framing AI as the next phase of Meta's connection mission.
Zuckerberg wrote that Meta is 'focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.' The distribution question is real: Meta's AI stack, from Llama to its consumer assistant to the Ray-Ban smart glasses, is aimed at billions of end users, not enterprise contracts.
The literary blind spot is not unique to Meta. Meta's Oculus unit famously handed new hires copies of 'Ready Player One,' a novel set in a dystopia caused by an overpowered VR company. OpenAI's Sam Altman has cited the film 'Her' as inspiration, despite it being a cautionary tale about AI emotional dependence. Palantir took its name from a surveillance stone used by the Dark Lord in 'Lord of the Rings.'
The pattern is well-known enough online that writer Alex Blechman's November 8, 2021 tweet about tech companies building the 'Torment Nexus' from a cautionary sci-fi novel has become industry shorthand. The AI cohort keeps supplying fresh examples.
Meta is not the only lab botching its own PR. Anthropic released a spot on July 14, 2026 that opened on a burning house and moved through images of facial-recognition surveillance, homeless encampments, cemeteries, and mine laborers, while a voiceover asked whether AI can be trusted. The ad was meant to position Anthropic as the responsible builder of Claude.
“I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something”— Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO
It did not land that way. Altman responded on X that he had assumed the ad was satire and had been looking for a misspelled handle. Anthropic's ad and Meta's ad were both trying to shape public opinion on AI. Both ended up being mocked by rival CEOs and reporters within days.
The polling explains why the labs feel the need to try. A recent Pew survey found only 16% of Americans think AI's impact on society over the next 20 years will be positive, while 40% expect a negative impact. That is a durable gap, and it is the number every frontier lab is now spending advertising budget to close.
The AI market is entering a phase where the technology is real, the capital commitments are enormous, and the public has not been convinced. Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all now running consumer campaigns that assume the fight is over vibes and framing rather than product. On the evidence of the last two weeks, they are losing that fight badly, and paying licensing fees to David Bowie's estate to lose it more loudly.
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