Meta's AI optimism campaign is set to a song about human extinction, echoing Anthropic's tone-deaf ad trend

Meta's AI Optimism Ad Is Set to a Song About Human Extinction. AI Companies Keep Selling the Wrong Story.

Meta wants you to feel good about AI. Its newest advertisement opens in black and white, cycling through panicked headlines about job losses, isolation, and global crisis. Then it bursts into color: couples dancing on rooftops, children frolicking in fields, friends embracing after time apart. Zuckerberg shared the video with a message about giving people tools to "reach your full potential" 1.

The soundtrack is David Bowie's "Five Years," a song about humanity learning it has five years left before a mass-extinction event 1. The specific passage Meta used repeats the word "people," which, stripped of context, sounds uplifting. In context, it is a countdown to annihilation.

This would be a one-off creative blunder if it weren't part of a pattern. Two weeks earlier, Anthropic debuted its own commercial during a World Cup match. It opened with footage of a burning house, then cut through still images of gravestones, a homeless couple on the street, and laborers in a West African granite quarry. Voiceovers asked, "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's going to hit the brakes if we need to?" before pivoting to warm shots of mothers, medical workers, and humpback whales 2.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the Anthropic spot "satire" 1. That came from a competitor with every reason to undercut Anthropic. But the mockery stuck because the ad genuinely was incoherent: it was selling a product by showing you everything you fear about it.

Both ads share the same structural problem, and it isn't that the creative teams are careless. It's that the companies making these ads operate in a fundamentally different emotional register than the public they're trying to reach.

When Meta pairs extinction with optimism, and Anthropic pairs apocalypse with reassurance, what they're doing is revealing how they see themselves: as forces of civilizational consequence, companies operating at the scale of human destiny. Anthropic has said its technology's impact "might be comparable to that of the industrial and scientific revolutions" 2. Meta has staked hundreds of billions of dollars on AI transforming human experience 1. These are companies that think in epochs.

The public thinks in paychecks. A Pew Research survey found that only 16% of Americans believe AI's impact on society over the next 20 years will be positive, while 40% expect a negative impact 1. Those are not existential fears. They are practical ones: Will I still have a job? Can I trust what I see online? Who is accountable when this goes wrong?

The gap between these two registers is where both ads break down. Meta's spot opens with a montage of headlines about AI-driven job losses and social breakdown, then asks viewers to feel inspired by a song about the end of the world. Anthropic's shows burning houses and cemeteries, then asks you to trust that everything will be fine. Neither lands because both skip past the question people actually want answered: what does this technology mean for my daily life, and what are you doing to make sure it doesn't make things worse?

This is not an unfamiliar pattern. Apple ran an ad showing musical instruments and art supplies crushed under a hydraulic press to promote the iPad, which audiences read as a metaphor for technology destroying creativity. Apple apologized 2. Google pulled an Olympics ad where a father used Gemini to help his daughter write fan mail after public backlash 2. Both were cases where a company's internal narrative about its product collided with how the public experienced it.

But there is a meaningful difference. Apple and Google were selling tools: a tablet, a search assistant. Meta and Anthropic are selling a worldview. Their ads fail not because the execution is clumsy but because the worldview itself is internally contradictory. You cannot position AI as a force of civilizational magnitude and simultaneously as a warm, everyday companion. The contradiction surfaces in every frame: Bowie's apocalyptic wail underneath footage of children laughing, a voiceover questioning whether AI can be trusted over images of human suffering.

The cost compounds. Every ad that misfires doesn't just fail to persuade. It confirms the suspicion that these companies don't grasp the concerns they're trying to address. You cannot sell transcendence to an audience that wants a straight answer about Tuesday.