Meta Bets on People with Bowie’s Five-Year Extinction Song

Meta’s newest AI ad opens on a black-and-white eye scanning doom headlines about jobs, isolation and crisis, then flips to color as smiling faces appear and a voiceover declares the company is betting on people. The soundtrack is David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a 1972 track about Earth dying in five years.

That pairing landed this week as another awkward chapter in the AI industry’s attempt to buy goodwill while pouring capital into the same technology much of the public still distrusts.

The Spot That Flips from Panic to Rainbow

The one-minute piece, posted to Meta’s Instagram and Facebook accounts, begins with the monochrome eye reading panicked stories. “Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” the narrator says. “We couldn’t disagree more.”

Color floods in. People open their eyes and smile. A couple dances on a rooftop under a rainbow. Teens swim in a lake. A child runs through a field. Friends hug. Instagram-style frames carry the moments. The voiceover finishes: “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.”

CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted alongside Meta’s official AI optimism video: “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.”

The ad also slips in sunny uses of Meta’s smart glasses, carefully avoiding the creepier surveillance reputation those devices have collected.

Bowie Wrote Doom and Still Talked Optimism

The song choice is the part that stuck. “Five Years” opens Ziggy Stardust with news that Earth is dying. The narrator watches panic, violence and small redemptions unfold while the clock runs.

Meta used the later, denser section that repeats “people” over and over:

• I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies
• I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs
• And all the fat, skinny people / And all the tall, short people
• And all the nobody people / And all the somebody people
• I never thought I’d need so many people

It skips the opener about the news guy weeping that Earth was really dying and the five years left to cry in.

Reached by Wired, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan pointed to Bowie’s 1972 NME remarks on optimism. Bowie said people were “so incredibly serious and scared of the future that I would wish to turn the feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism.” He wanted to “take the micky out of the future” because “It’s going to be unbelievably technological.”

The same Bowie Bible page notes the song still “speaks of a dystopian nightmare.” Drummer Woody Woodmansey later recalled that Bowie cried while recording the vocal because they all knew it was about the end of the world and pretty depressing.

Pitchfork’s Jeremy D. Larson told Wired the choice felt “either really ignorant or really insidious.” Hearing Bowie used for AI, he added, felt “especially and specifically nonconsensual.”

Anthropic Tried the Dark Road First

Meta is not alone. A few weeks earlier Anthropic released “There’s hope in hard questions.” It opens on a burning house, then cuts through facial-recognition crowds, a person sleeping rough, rows of tombstones and laborers in a mine. Voices ask “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” before the tone softens toward families and a whale.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied on X that he thought it was satire and kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something. The post drew millions of views.

Both ads try to meet fear head-on. Both leave many viewers colder than before. The pattern is becoming familiar: when the product itself has not yet convinced people it is safe or net-positive, the creative department reaches for either pure sunshine or controlled dread.

Survey Numbers Stay Stubbornly Cool

A Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 U.S. adults conducted in February 2026 found the public still leans negative on AI’s long-term societal effects.

Four in ten adults say AI will have a 40 percent expect negative societal impact. Only 16 percent expect a positive one. Younger adults are even warier. Sixty-three percent say AI is advancing too quickly. Seventy-one percent believe it will make their personal information less secure. Majorities lack confidence that government can regulate it or that companies will develop it responsibly.

Chatbot use has risen; about half of adults now report using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. That familiarity has not flipped the outlook numbers. Meta AI itself registers only 14 percent usage in the same survey, well behind ChatGPT’s 44 percent.

What the Final Cut Quietly Removes

On X, several viewers noticed the surgical edit. One widely shared observation pointed out that Meta kept the “people” catalogue and dropped every line about the incoming disaster, turning an extinction song into a montage about different kinds of people (using Meta products?). The crowd take is sharp: the company wanted the emotional lift of Bowie’s melody and the word “people” without the apocalypse that gives the song its charge.

That edit is the ironic heart of the campaign. Bowie built the track so the catalogue of ordinary lives lands harder because the clock is running out. Strip the clock and the refrain becomes a generic unity anthem. Meta’s bet on people therefore rests on a version of the song that no longer carries the urgency Bowie wrote into it.

The same companies keep citing science-fiction warnings as inspiration while shipping products that look a lot like the warnings. The Torment Nexus meme still travels for a reason.

Hundreds of Billions Ride on the Same Bet

The ad is convenient packaging for a capital plan measured in hundreds of billions. Meta has guided AI-related capital expenditures in a range that has climbed toward $115 billion to $145 billion for 2026, nearly double prior levels, aimed at training models and delivering “personal super intelligence.” Peer spending is just as aggressive; Alphabet’s own $205 billion AI spending path shows how far the industry is all-in.

Those outlays show up in physical form as massive data centers. Financing costs are not free; rising yields on Meta’s Texas AI data-center bonds already price in higher risk. The marketing message has to carry some of that weight: if the public stays skeptical, regulation, hiring, adoption and political cover all get harder.

So far the ads are not moving the needle. Usage climbs while net optimism stays low. The next wave of spots will likely try new flavors of the same tension: either more sunshine or more controlled darkness. Neither has yet produced the trust the builders say they want.

Meta likes the odds on people. The survey data and the edited soundtrack suggest the house still holds an edge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What song did Meta use in its new AI ad?

David Bowie’s “Five Years” from the 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Meta used the mid-song section that lists types of people and avoided the opening verses about Earth dying and five years left to cry.

Did David Bowie ever say the song was optimistic?

Yes. In a July 1972 NME interview he said he wanted to turn fear of the future “into a wave of optimism” and “take the micky out of” a technological future. Meta’s spokesperson cited that quote. Contemporaries and later interviews still describe the track as dystopian and emotionally heavy; Bowie cried during the vocal take.

How does public opinion on AI compare with Meta’s message?

Pew’s February 2026 survey found 40 percent of U.S. adults expect AI’s impact on society over the next 20 years to be negative and only 16 percent expect it to be positive. Personal impact tilts less negative (31 percent negative, 23 percent positive). About half now use chatbots, yet majorities still say the technology is moving too fast and will harm privacy.

What was Anthropic’s recent ad like?

Anthropic’s “There’s hope in hard questions” opens with a burning house and cycles through surveillance, homelessness, cemeteries and mining before shifting to warmer images and questions about trust and brakes. Sam Altman publicly called it satire-adjacent. Both ads attempt to own risk language and both drew mockery for tone.

Is Meta actually spending hundreds of billions on AI?

Yes. Company guidance and earnings commentary put 2026 AI-related capital expenditures in the $115-145 billion range, focused on infrastructure for models and “personal super intelligence.” That scale matches or exceeds peer big-tech AI builds and shows up in data-center financing costs.