Meta Bets ‘On People’ In Sickly AI Spot

Meta has launched a new campaign positioning itself as the optimist’s answer to AI doom.

The campaign is built entirely around the idea that AI won’t isolate people, it’ll empower them and strengthen connection. Unveiled by Zuckerberg on Thursday, the spot opens in stark black and white, scanning across “AI doom” type headlines focused on job losses and fear.

Then a voiceover cuts in: “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.”

It’s followed by rooftop dancing, kids jumping into a lake, running through fields and friends hugging.

“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want,” the voiceover says, landing on the tagline: “The future is for everyone.”

The spot is framed as Meta’s answer to what its AI “doomers”. The companies and commentators painting a dystopian picture of where the AI wave is heading.

It includes a feel-good soundtrack in the form of David Bowie’s “Five Years”. A song about humanity discovering it has five years left to live before total extinction.

In a post to Facebook, unveiling the campaign Zuckerberg wrote: “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.”

“It’s easy to feel like the future is heading toward less connection and less agency. We’re taking a different stance: we think AI will empower people,” Meta’s chief marketing officer Denise Moreno added in a post to LinkedIn.

It’s a nice sentiment to land in the same fortnight Meta quietly pulled a feature from its new AI image tool, Muse Image, just days after launch.  The feature, called Muse Image, let users generate and manipulate pictures of other people by tagging their public Instagram handles. It had public accounts opted in by default.

The tool lasted three days before privacy groups, before Meta was forced to pull it. The tech giant admitted that the feature “missed the mark.”

Anthropic, meanwhile, recently won the Cannes Lion Film Grand Prix highlighting the absurdity of advertising within AI chatbots.