Friends, the AI industry has delivered a story so funny today that it'll carry me through the weekend.

Here's what happened: Meta recently released a new ad themed "AI optimism." The visuals are aggressively positive — a black-and-white shot of an eye reading panicked headlines about AI taking jobs and sparking crisis, then the world shifts to color: couples dancing on rooftops pointing at rainbows, teens swimming in lakes, kids frolicking in fields, friends embracing after time apart. A voiceover says earnestly: "Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it's going to leave us behind. We couldn't disagree more."

Guess what the soundtrack is? David Bowie's "Five Years."

If you don't know the song, let me tell you what it's about. News breaks that the earth has five years left before it dies, and humanity panics. The opening lines: "News had just come over / We had five years left to cry in / News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying."

Yes, you read that correctly. Meta picked a song about humanity collectively panicking after learning it has five years to live as the BGM for its upbeat "AI makes the world better" ad.

Zuck Himself Shared It, Captioned "The Future Is for Everyone"

Even better: Mark Zuckerberg personally shared the ad on Facebook, writing: "Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want. As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone."

Friends, let that sink in. "The future is for everyone" — soundtracked by "we've got five years left to cry."

TechCrunch reporter Amanda Silberling, to make sure she wasn't overreading, asked her brother — "a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun" — what the song was about. His answer: "I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth." Yep. Even a STEM bro who doesn't read poetry could tell: this song is about the apocalypse.

Why did Meta's ad team pick this song? Because the chorus repeats the word "people" over and over, sounding upbeat and inspiring. If you don't listen to the verses, don't read the lyrics, and don't know the song's context, you might actually think it's a tune about human unity. But with even 30 seconds of basic research — literally just reading the lyrics — this mistake was impossible to make.

This Isn't the First AI Company Ad Fail Lately

Believe it or not, Meta isn't the only AI company to release a horror-show ad recently.

A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an ad that opens with a burning house, then cuts to a series of still images: crowds surveilled by facial recognition, homeless people sleeping on the street, row after row of tombstones in a cemetery, what appear to be laborers toiling in a mine. The voiceover features different people asking: "Can AI be trusted?" "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" OpenAI's Sam Altman saw it and roasted it on X: "I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something."

Palantir — the company that builds AI surveillance systems for governments — is named after the Palantíri, the "seeing stones" in Lord of the Rings that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has repeatedly cited the movie "Her" as inspiration — "Her" being a film about the tragedy of over-reliance on AI for emotional companionship. Oculus used to give new employees copies of "Ready Player One" — a novel set in a dystopia where a tech company making VR products becomes overly powerful and evil.

These tech leaders lift names and concepts from dystopian sci-fi, then run ads telling everyone "AI is making the world a better place." The irony is thicker than Meta's BGM choice.

A recent Pew survey found that only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society over the next 20 years, with 40% expecting a negative impact. After seeing Meta and Anthropic's ads, I'm starting to understand why — if you can't even pick a non-apocalyptic BGM for your ad, how is anyone supposed to trust you to manage AGI?

A Few Practical Reminders

1. When picking BGM for marketing, decks, or keynotes, always read the full lyrics. Don't just use a song because the chorus sounds catchy. Googling "what is this song about" takes 30 seconds; cleaning up after a PR disaster takes weeks.

2. Before publishing PR content, have a friend with a humanities background glance at it. Tech folks might hear "Five Years" as rousing; anyone who's read a book knows what it's about. Hiring one English major to review marketing copy is way cheaper than an apology tour.

3. If you work in Meta's marketing department, you might want to avoid Twitter/X today. The replies are already a roast session.

That's all the cao for today. See you tomorrow.