Meta has launched a new advertising campaign set to a song about human extinction.
The video opens with a black-and-white shot of an eye, simulating the view of someone scrolling through panicked headlines about artificial intelligence taking jobs, isolating people, and sparking a global crisis.
“Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” a voiceover states. “We couldn’t disagree more.”
The footage then shifts to colour. A cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling follows. A couple dances on a rooftop while pointing at a rainbow. A group of teenagers swim in a lake. A child plays in a field. Friends embrace after time apart.
“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 voiceover continues. “The future is for everyone.”
The sentiment is pleasant, though convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that artificial intelligence will transform humanity. The strangest element of the advertisement is not that these happy moments appear as Instagram posts. It is that the soundtrack is the David Bowie song “Five Years.”
For those unfamiliar with the track, it is worth listening to and reading the lyrics. The song describes the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass extinction event in five years.
To verify this interpretation without relying on poetry studies, I asked my brother, a blockchain analyst who does not read for pleasure, what the song was about. He replied that he initially thought of climate change, then a zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth. He is correct.
If you are not familiar with Bowie’s music, the track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad’s upbeat tone. The section used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it repeats the word “people” frequently. Without the context of the song, the meaning is unclear.
However, the lines directly preceding this section are different:
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying
We “had five years left to cry in” and the “earth was really dying.” It is pretty bleak.
It is not reassuring to convince people that artificial intelligence will make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world. Yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want,” he wrote alongside the 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.”
Tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills. Meta’s Oculus used to give 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 and evil. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited inspiration from the movie “Her,” which warns about the dangers of using artificial intelligence for emotional support. Palantir, a company that builds artificial intelligence surveillance systems for the government, is named after a seeing stone from the “Lord of the Rings” franchise that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. Elon Musk is currently throwing a fit about the “accuracy” of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey,” a story with such realistic elements as sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention. These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities.
Meta isn’t alone in its recent promotional foibles. Instead of racing to build artificial general intelligence, the top artificial intelligence companies seem to be fighting over who can make the creepiest advertisement. A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an eerie video of its own.
As my colleague Lucas Ropek described it:
The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming start) before pivoting to a series of still images. These images include a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine where (presumably) raw materials for smartphones are being dug up.
Meanwhile, a voice-over track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”
Anthropic is trying to convince us that it understands the risks artificial intelligence poses to society, and therefore, this is the company that people can trust to develop artificial intelligence responsibly. The message it actually conveys feels closer to the mood of Bowie’s “Five Years.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the Anthropic ad, “I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.”
As these companies spar to control the public perception of artificial intelligence, their efforts don’t seem to be making much progress. A recent Pew survey found that only 16% of Americans think that artificial intelligence’s impact on society over the next twenty years will be positive, and 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Better luck next time, Meta.
