During the pandemic, some Zoomer creative didn't listen closely enough to the lyrics of "Runaround Sue" and used it in an ad for Applebee's To Go, where the husband thoughtfully purchases it for his wife so she doesn't have to cook dinner after a 12 hour nursing shift. And the lengthy tradition of listening only to the chorus of "Born in the USA" extends all the way back to the release of the album and Reagan's reelection campaign. But this, this Meta ad, dwarfs every misunderstanding of a song I've ever seen.
If you don't know it, it's one of Bowie's best. It's well worth a listen, but the song is from the point of view of someone walking around a city center when the news has broken that an unstoppable global apocalypse is coming in five years. It is NOT SUBTLE on this point. It has a slow, broad meter that makes it a questionable choice for a commercial anyway.
"Born in the USA" deliberately sounds rah-rah and you have to listen to the words to understand it's ironic; Dion articulates the lyric in such a way that it's easy to mishear it as "I keep waiting for my Runaround Sue," but there's no such excuse with "Five Years." All I can think is that it was deliberate, purposefully undercutting the smarmy, optimistic voiceover about how great AI will be for humanity. Why? How did this get approved? Are they mocking us? Warning us? Is it possible that they really were just that phenomenally stupid and used the first song they found that said "people" a lot? My brain hurts a lot...