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OpenAI’s attempt to boost its image by hiring influencers collided against a harsh reality: that it’s already become a fundamentally uncool company.
The Verge details how influencers recruited by the ChatGPT maker were flown out to its “first ever brand trip” at a nature retreat outside New York City. But rather than creating buzz for OpenAI, gaining widespread attention, or at least showcasing its products, the content that came out of its “Summer Club” campaign sparked fierce backlash against the influencers, who were branded “sellouts.”
“People will literally sell their soul and their planet down the river for a nice free hotel room,” one TikTok commenter quoted by the reporting seethed.
“Wow! Beautiful greenery! They should put a data center there!” another jeered.
It’s not uncommon for companies to rely on engagement bait — and even rage bait — to gain attention. But this didn’t appear to be an intentional maneuver on OpenAI’s part.
Most of these posts and videos barely get any attention, racking up only, at best, a few hundred likes and a few thousand views. But videos criticizing the OpenAI influencers — or “creators,” as the company prefers to refer to them — have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, including from other influencers who didn’t take the AI bag.
“They’re all a bunch of f*cking phony sellouts,” Meredith Lynch, a comedian known for her TikTok content, said in one viral call-out video.
As the influencers, most of them women, toted around branded merch and reveled in their bucolic surroundings, many couldn’t help but point out the hypocrisy of laundering the image of an industry whose data centers have perilous effects on the environment. The choice to select mostly women feels noteworthy, given that, as the Verge‘s reporting observes, women tend to view AI more negatively than men do.
What’s particularly baffling was how relatively little content came out of the trip, according to The Verge, with almost none of it actually about OpenAI’s chief product, ChatGPT. Instead it was “largely aspirational lifestyle content focused on the free swag and pretty setting” — with no clear idea on how it’s supposed to reflect on the company, other than the fact it’s willing to comp expensive trips for a small group of extremely vain people.
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