OpenAI recently hosted a few business and tech influencers for the company’s first brand trip, and when the videos hit social media timelines, the backlash was swift. Already facing scrutiny on multiple fronts, the company has likely seen any hope dashed that this move would boost its reputation.
OpenAI misses the mark
The high-end getaway, dubbed “OpenAI Summer Camp,” was held at Wildflower Farms, a “luxury resort in New York's Hudson Valley” where room rates can exceed $2,000 a night, Business Insider said. Creators were treated to an itinerary that included “lessons about OpenAI’s latest tools” and a “session with a beekeeper.”
They also received OpenAI-branded merchandise, including canvas bags and jars of honey. The trip comes as the AI lab faces controversy amid anxiety about “rising energy prices, water use and potential job displacement,” said Business Insider. The weekend's “pastoral content” swiftly drew criticism across social media. Critics questioned why a company associated with “several energy- and water-intensive data centers” was treating influencers at a “nature-focused resort.”
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The comment sections of many of the influencers who attended were flooded with messages questioning their morals. Many cited the “environmental effects of the AI boom, the contentious buildout of data centers across the U.S.” and the potential for job loss due to AI integration in the critiques, The Verge said.
After “being in the room with people who work on this product,” creator Grace McCarrick was excited to post content, according to a video she posted from the trip while running a bath. Shocked by the controversy, she “genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI,” she said on LinkedIn. The trip exposed her to the “shocking AI psychosis running rampant online.” People in the real world “do not run around like a chicken with their heads cut off, screaming about water usage and wildlife and (curiously) fascism.”
As the influencers come under fire, OpenAI maintains that the content creators are an “important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said to Fast Company. The lab welcomes “healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent.”
Why one company and not the others
OpenAI is not the “only AI lab that has worked with influencers,” said TechCrunch. Anthropic reportedly held a brand dinner for Claude, and Microsoft hosted a Super Bowl brand trip for influencers, according to tech newsletter Sarah and Kate. None of those other AI-led trips seem to have “struck as big of a nerve as this OpenAI brand trip.”
There is also “more to the timing of the trip that struck people,” said TechCrunch. OpenAI has plans to make a “$500 billion deal” to build a data center in Ohio at a time when the “socio-ecological impact of AI data centers has taken center stage.” Again, detractors pointed out the irony that “OpenAI held a brand retreat in a luxury resort nestled in nature.” OpenAI also has a “$200 million contract with the Department of Defense,” yet another reason the “brand trip evoked ire.”
For these competitors courting influencers, the “objective is similar,” but the “difference is execution,” said Inc. Anthropic is known for throwing creator events that have been “smaller dinners and pop-ups,” in which Claude “remained the ostensible subject.” OpenAI made the “resort, gifts and coordinated access impossible to miss.”
A creator dinner with Claude does not “give me the same reaction as seeing a luxury resort for an OpenAI ChatGPT weekend,” Meredith Lynch, a creator who covers politics and pop culture, said to Inc. It felt like a “propaganda trip — to take this technology that is getting a lot of pushback and sanitize it through aesthetically beautiful content creation.” The problem is not the existence of an influencer trip, but the format “carries different implications” when used to “build trust in a technology facing criticism over job displacement and data centers’ energy and water use.”
