Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction

9:28 AM · July 24, 2026

Meta’s newest advertisement opens with panicked headlines about AI taking jobs and isolating people before shifting to warm, colorful scenes of people reconnecting, with a voiceover insisting ‘the future is for everyone’ as Mark Zuckerberg reiterated the company’s belief that AI will help people reach their full potential. The soundtrack choice undercuts the message: the ad uses a section of David Bowie’s ‘Five Years,’ a song whose lyrics, just before the part used in the commercial, describe humanity learning that ‘we had five years left to cry in’ because ‘earth was really dying,’ making it a song about mass extinction rather than connection. The gaffe follows a similarly unsettling ad Anthropic released earlier this month, which paired images of surveillance, homelessness, and cemeteries with questions like ‘can AI be trusted,’ prompting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to joke he thought it was satire. Taken together, the missteps suggest AI companies are struggling to control public messaging around their technology even as they spend heavily to shape perception, a challenge underscored by a recent Pew survey showing just 16 percent of Americans expect AI’s societal impact over the next twenty years to be positive, versus 40 percent who expect it to be negative. The episode is a reminder that the industry’s marketing instincts have not caught up with how skeptical the public already is, regardless of how carefully art-directed the ads are.