‘Call us whatever the hell you want’: Mark Zuckerberg just launched an AI optimism blitz using nostalgia to sell Meta’s AI future amid backlash
Marketing experts say Meta invokes Facebook-era optimism while leaving recent AI lawsuits and product backlash unaddressed.
In a week where an AI model went rogue and broke out of a secure test environment—and in a year where seemingly all we’re hearing is how AI can displace large swaths of the workforce—it may come as a surprise when one of the tech’s most prominent voices is pushing an optimistic view of the tech, joining the many in his field who have recently walked back comments of how it could negatively impact workers. “As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote as the caption to a short video on Thursday, harkening back to the company’s early years of tech optimism. “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 in the video said.
The video featured montages of people using Instagram, Whatsapp, FaceBook and Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses to film touching moments and connect with loved ones, with the backdrop of concerts and snowboarding and laughing children set to calm music as the voiceover framed Meta’s AI efforts as doubling down on betting on people, just like the company did 22 years ago with FaceBook. Marketing experts told Fortune that the Meta video’s reliance on nostalgic imagery seemed like a way to redirect attention from AI concerns and to buffer against growing AI fears. “They’re showing people having a great time, but they’re not really responding to what the fundamental issue is, which is how is AI going to impact me when I start dealing with your platform when you integrate all of that technology into it,” Mara Einstein, a media studies professor at CUNY’s Queens College, told Fortune.
“The problem is the AI technology is not the same as previous versions of social media that they have used to connect people in the past.” The sentiment was echoed by Ana Babic Rosario, a marketing professor at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, who pointed to Meta’s more recent struggles as reason w
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