put 'good for the world' in quotes because obviously it's not
A more neutral headline would be: OpenAI Is Enlisting Influencers to Promote Its Public Image.
The rest of the article reads like anti-AI slop. For instance:
The company isn't asking influencers to assuage fears that a rogue AI could destroy humanity.
It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it. And I don't buy that it's being jammed down the throats by most employers. Sometimes maybe, but I see the reverse, where people WANT to use frontier models and are being prevented through archaic security hoops.
The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?
The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?
It may be a difficult concept for an astroturfer to understand, but people are activists for free. If you have found any anti-AI financiers, please share them so I can apply. Of course you already know there are none.
The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?
The companies are doing this themselves in a (stupid) attempt to do regulatory capture/ set up a cartel. Dario Amodei recently published an essay pushing this idea.
And I don't buy that it's being jammed down the throats by most employers. Sometimes maybe, but I see the reverse, where people WANT to use frontier models and are being prevented through archaic security hoops.
What is N here? 1?
It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world.
Is it though? Do we actually know that? Is it growing faster than facebook did or google search? Is it even possible to measure when some of the "adoption" is probably people triggering it incidentally (e.g. AI mode in google search shouldn't count as adoption here).
People are worried about it because it is a highly disruptive technology with unproven ROI for businesses as of yet (restricting claims to LLMs here). It has a lot of negative potential side effects for many different groups of people. The media is reflecting these viewpoints. If there's any astroturfing going on, it's from the pro LLM camp.
So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.
That's not implied by engagement. It's possible to use the advantage AI gives you in a competitive landscape while still fearing the future it will bring.
It's clear that people are using it for personal reasons
The Brookings Institution / AmeriSpeak Survey: A nationwide survey found that 57% of Americans use generative AI for personal tasks (such as web browsing, daily use, or information searches), while only 21% report using it in a professional or work role.
Is there "competitive" reasons to have an AI girlfriend? There is an implied preference that you like the technology by using it by choice and you don't think it will end civilization. You may tell pollsters you're worried but it's the same people telling pollsters sea levels are rising while investing in beach front real estate. Meaningless.
It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.
This in itself is not an argument. British Opium was selling like hotcakes in China, so surely people people must have had a general favorable impression if they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it?
The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?
It was discussed a while ago on HN, with a more well known source, that I cannot find right now, but on a quick DDG search this is a quick article I could conjure.
I agree, but there's also a whole domestic "AI doom industry". The pipeline from AI researcher to guest on popular podcasts promoting your stop-AI-from-killing-us startup/"non-profit" is less than a year.
It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it
It is popular because it’s useful but people still have unfavorable attitudes towards it in polls. It’s like Amazon. We use Amazon cuz it’s convenient but do we like the way Bezos treats his employees?
put 'good for the world' in quotes because obviously it's not
It's in quotes because it appears to be an specific phrase used by a campaign pitch (supposedly).
It's different from normal advertising of a commercial product which obviously will call their product "good", but "good for the world" implies something deeper.
It’s being jammed into products where it’s not wanted. I use AI every day with good results, but I do not want it in my browser, my OS, my text editor, or AI summaries in my search engine. I want it in a separate web app where I can use it or not.
So am I pro- or anti- AI? Both. It depends what it is.
And they only count the influencers who use the OpenAI's partner hashtags!
US business model: go into billions of debt, brainwash the population via YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Hacker News influencers. Intimidate foreign governments to allow the current snake oil. Wait a decade until you have minor profits and the stock price is through the roof because #growth-mindset.
Apple doesn't even have to pay them, just give them a chance to feel special with a new palette of colours. Who really thought they'd be unique for choosing the orange phone?
You're telling me that you'd be surprised that people would be paid to boost messages on HN, a site filled with shitloads of above income earners in a multi-trillion dollar industry?
I don't want to be mean, but don't you think you're being a little naive here?
I wish I could find the email, but awhile ago one YC startup pitched me on a six-figure job role solely dedicated to posting/commenting on Hacker News about it. Apparently I did not respond "no, that's stupid."
yeah, I have contemplated that as well and thought it would be an interesting project (since hacker news provides open data) to analyze it for signals of influence/manipulation and around which entities and topics they cluster.
Just know you are citing one of the most disgraced science communicator YouTuber here. I for one don‘t trust anything she says. In fact when Sabine Hossenfelder says something, I tend to believe the opposite.
What's worse is every major company is doing things like this. If you're a large enough company to be considered "evil" by someone you have media/social media teams duking it out in the advertizing-sphere.
Now, don't take it as me saying what OpenAI is doing is good. It's more if you're in the industry you know that if you're not doing things like this, you're the only one. Whole damned thing is corrupt.
Look, Effective Altruism money that goes through multiple funds (Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) => Center for AI Safety (CAIS)) can have any ulterior motive.
Like using doomerism to get regulatory capture for Big AI.
Seems like an obvious response from OpenAI ngl.
What response? Big AI has been paying influencers forever and they can afford more than Hossenfelder:
I'm not definitively claiming one side started it. One side is clearly marking it as advertisement and companies advertise and influencer marketing is just another channel now.
I'm saying, the game is the game and everyone's playing it.
I don't like it either. I think all influencers should be declaring payments.
There's been multiple YouTubers saying they've been paid recently to make... AI Doomerism videos (e.g. Sabine).
I imagine this is simply part of the campaign, AI doomerism followed by AI Bloomerism, it could even be part of the same organisation's campaign; selling the solution to a problem they put in your mind. Hype, criti-hype, it's all so tiresome.
could even be part of the same organisation's campaign
Eh we know its part of the same campaigns. "Please provide us with regulatory capture because our tech is an existential threat" has been going on for a while now.
And that is incredibly unfortunate to their business strategy.
But... food for thought: people are good at detecting slop, because it looks like slop. If it does not, people won't detect it. So there is a confirmation bias, where the "obvious slop" looks obvious, but the "better slop" goes by undetected.
This is the mistake they made. Anthropic and OpenAI are great technically. I love them. But they are absolute crap at making most people feeling like its relevant to them or that AI companies care about them. So its' really easy to be dismissive of the tech and oppose things like data centers. I think the influencer route is a quick fix. They need to appeal to everyday problems but, understandably, the founders like Dario and Altman think very high level. They think they are doing what's best in a way, but not in a way that's relateable to most people. LLMs need to be more human friendly; example, solve little problems like actually writing without sounding like AI
I think the OP was referring not to their public image, but to the incongruity of paying human influencers instead of deploying computer-generated influencers created by their world-beating models supposedly worth $30T.
OpenAI is trying to level up their growth marketing to match Anthropic’s. Tactics in growth marketing (speaking from my experience leading in this space) are not public knowledge as it’s a cat-and-mouse game on multiple fronts (ie CAC goes up and changes the economics when a high ROI source is found, etc. etc. etc.), which makes hiring the right person vital as information asymmetries are where the ROI is (ie more revenue per dollar spent on marketing). Anthropic hired the right person for strategy and execution long ago in LLM-years, and there is a good podcast on the story here:
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-grow...
They're buying the credibility of the influencers.
Influencers have the greatest influence on their audience, especially repeat viewers who follow or subscribe to them. You need to establish credibility with an audience before you're worth anything to the marketers. This takes time to build.
OpenAI's hypothetical robot influencers have no audience.
World's best AI models doesn't offset public resentment caused by putting data centers in residential areas, openly buying off the White House and Congress with PAC "donations" and constantly threatening to eliminate everyone's job.
I feel like the "We hacked hugging face" thing and this influencer thing are targeting different things but have the same goal of hyping up the company for the IPO.
- The HF incident was to get the attention of investors and convey the message: "we have this incredibly powerful technology, imagine where we will be in 5 years"
- With this influencer campaign it's just a drive to get more people to use ChatGPT / sign up to ChatGPT so when IPO time comes, they can show strong user growth.
Over the past few months I've seen various reports that OpenAI's financial position isn't great and if those reports have any merit, then likely the higher ups at OpenAI are panicking that they might become a WeWork 2.0. Everything they are doing now is an attempt to justify their $1T valuation to investors during the IPO.
I think it’s more that YC is so heavily invested in AI-related stuff it cannot then have a message board affiliated with it that has anti-AI content on it. Maybe it has always been like this for anything YC had its fingers in and it was just less obvious?
[…] The company isn't asking influencers to assuage fears that a rogue AI could destroy humanity. Instead, it's prompting them to showcase why ChatGPT is "cool" […]
Emphasis mine - ouch. So either influencers are automatons like LLMs who just do as their current-highest-bidder says based on a prompt (!), or in fact perhaps we skipped that bit and they’re all LLMs, for convenience. Or in this post-thinking world we just say prompt instead of ask or instruct.
Not sure which dystopian option displeases me least.
One could call it Elonism as an evolution of entrepreneurial capitalism. Had Elizabeth Holmes taken the time to build an influencer army instead of doing PR the traditional way, she might not be in prison.
Yes, if the product is seen as bad for the world, it won't sell. But it's pretty bad for people, and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.
Go talk to an artist, a junior developer, or a musician. And then realize that the goal is to generalize the damage to every other intellectual domain.
Don’t forget the effect on students! It has the potential to be a great learning tool, but nothing is in place for that to happen. It more likely just kills all reinforcement learning
I have the opposite experience. My intellectual curiosity has increased immensely since starting to use Chat GPT. I can snap a picture and instantly know what kind of bug I am looking at, whether I am looking at a Red-Tailed hawk or a Red-Shouldered hawk and how to tell the difference, what the gauges on my water tank and boiler mean, and numerous other things that I am curious about daily.
These are things around me that I wouldn't have bothered to investigate just due to time and effort. And now I appreciate all these little curiosities more than ever.
Being able to look something up real quick isn’t the same as knowing something, is it, especially in the specific absence of some reinforcement mechanism to retain it?
I mean for me personally I have always had an obsession for knowing these things anyways, it just lowered the barrier to entry for me a little bit in terms of information gathering
First I went from asking my parents then reading lots of books then specifically researching on google and forums now for most general knowledge information I can just ask AI
I'd like to argue the other way around, it can be bad for some people while still being extinction-level bad for entire species. I'm not talking about sentient AI going Matrix, i'm talking about the real material impact of datacenters being built so that a small minority can enjoy funny tools.
ChatGPT was shown to support and even encourage dangerous drug use, with statements such as "Hell yes—let's go full trippy mode" and advice on reducing his Xanax tolerance so that a single tablet will "fuck you up"
It has literally contributed to suicide and murders
So have many pharmaceuticals that are generally regarded as beneficial. Suicide is a side effect of more than a few, but doctors disregard that, believing that the results are worth the risk.
How proportional is it to deaths caused by other technologies by usage?
With large enough numbers the existence of any extremely rare event becomes certain. Consequently claiming there are instances carries no information value.
Proportionality is the only sensible measure. How much more dangerous are Chatbots compared to, say, teapots?
That’s close to whataboutism.. just because other technology can also be dangerous doesn’t absolve OpenAI/ChatGPT.
Also, ChatGPT is clearly exerting a massive (potential) influence on people if their MAU numbers are to be believed, so rightfully it should get attention on the potential harm.
Many of the vocal critics claiming AI will make us all dumb and is terrible go "I have two Max subscriptions myself.." at some point in the discussion.
That's a strawman argument. I'm pretty critical of LLMs and i don't use such tools. However, even in the strawman version, why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?
I mean, to make a terribly bad analogy, i don't immediately discount the bad experiences of soldiers in regards to killing people, or of addicts in regards to drug abuse.
However, even in the strawman version, why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?
Because the people doing that dismissing are being dishonest. Their goal is to attack and discredit their enemy, period. Critical testimony from a user has some vague similarities to hypocrisy, so can be twisted for propaganda purposes and portrayed as hypocrisy.
why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?
Because if you’re paying voluntarily for a tool that you don’t need, you have agency to remove your “suffering” by canceling your subscription and not use it! So the “suffer” complaint in those instances can be dismissed.
Hypocrisy is not actually a counterargument though. "Don't do this thing I do" doesn't mean they're wrong when they argue against that thing, and if anything can be a source of anecdata to bolster their case.
There are lots of products we know are bad for the world that still sell plenty well. Petroleum products (to include plastic), cigarettes, alcohol, guns, etc.
People generally understand that all of the above are not clear absolute negatives. There are some positives to each. And to LLMs.
Yes, if the product is seen as bad for the world, it won't sell. But it's pretty bad for people, and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.
That's not true. There are all kinds of products that benefit certain people, so sell, but are overall harmful to the world or a harmful to much larger number of people than those who benefit.
and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.
The trick is to make the people being harmed too powerless to stop the harm being done to them. Then your problem is solved and everyone (who matters) is happy.
This is insanely hyperbolic. OepnAI is not a "reich" there is no empire here, it's a company and some data centers. They don't have paramilitary thugs, territorial ambitions, or genocidal intent. They're just a run of the mill company run by an asshole.
I see no reason why they can’t target both at the same time. Personally I know two people who never would’ve paid for ChatGPT a year ago but now do so. I think for the average person it’s going to be a slow and difficult conversion process to paying customers.
anyone know whats going on with muse. twitter has gone crazy with fake things ppl've supposedly achieved like getting airline to refund 4k, negotiating 45k furniture to 5k, booking flights for 20 dollars. These are the same ppl that were hyping openclaw, not sure what happened to that.
and how muse topping charts. Its all befuddling to me.
Do influences really work? In general I don't care what they have
to say; usually they try to do an ad. Ublock origin either blocks
that, or I just jump past their propaganda if they babble about
some product I don't care (which, by default, is 100% - I really
never care about any advertisement at all. I would not know WHY
I would WANT to care. I am aware of "this is missing in your life"
but that still does not change anything - I am not interested in
hearing this).
Lately I noticed more and more youtube folks try in-video advertisements.
These are a bit harder to catch by ublock origin. In the past, I
would manually skip this, but recently I decided that if someone
has a need to sell some ad-crap, I simply no longer care and insta-close
the tab. That is actually much more efficient. And if many people do
so, we'll see fewer pester-ads in general. I understand the "but this
is how I make my money" - even that still does not make me want to
care about wasting my life on any ads whatsoever, no matter which
fancypants excuse is used.
In concluding, I now suspect that OpenAI must suck, since they depend
on propaganda outlets (aka "influencers"; I don't call them "influencers",
they are scummy people who work on something like mercenaries would,
just on the propaganda department. Any regular guy cleaning the streets
with a broom, has 10000x more credibility than these "influencers" - but
does not make as much money as these bribed individuals).
Have you seen the Japanese ads for chatgpt? The rapping is awful I don’t know if that’s because of Japanese rappers, AI lyrics or just the music itself it’s just so forced
Well, if it wasn't for llms my wife would still be bedridden 24/7 and doctors would still be thinking the problem was mostly psychological. So if OpenAI wants to pay me, just reach out and I'll share everything to my dozens of social media followers
I don't even know if they need an influencer army. I am seeing people out on the streets deferring to ChatGPT for even basic things in a way that Google never achieved.
I was at a hotel bar the other night and some guy kept bothering the bartender about what was on TV. Every time the bartender told him what they could do he went off for a few minutes, sent it to ChatGPT, and went back to the bar saying "well ChatGPT said this." I can't believe the bartender didn't lose his patience with it. The guy was fucking desperate to see some football on the telly and GPT kept telling him he was right to keep challenging the bartender.
Another guy looks lost with his family and he comes up to us and asks where a good restaurant is. We ask if he wants good local stuff or not and he says, he doesn't know, he just asked ChatGPT and felt like he got stranded. The restaurant it pointed out was like 2 minutes walk away. He was like the one guy in the family who seemed to speak english and was probably the one that was just dragging them around on a GPT adventure. The rest of them looked bored, like they were tired of his shit.
If it doesn't work out, it's not GPT that was wrong, it was everybody else. It pits technology against humanity again.
Scam Altman and the company culture he shaped - that’s what you get when you put a shady marketing hype-guy in a position where an actual scientist (or at least benevolent human) is urgently needed.
No wonder he relies on hype and manipulating social media mainly, as all actual scientists have left openAI years ago when they found out who Altman really is and unfortunately unsuccessfully tried to remove him.
What oAi nowadays attracts is unfortunately not the prime talent like in the beginning that were in it for a better world, but semi-talented virtue-signaling people who are attracted by the compensation and name recognition and, as we have seen it quite a few of their recent "innovation" claims, don’t mind misinterpreting, mislabeling and outright copy/steal other people’s innovations and putting big IPO-associated oAi stickers on it without deserving any of it.
interesting how there has been a big push these last couple days against openai on this platform.
eg. in the gpt 6 release thread i saw multiple people make absurd claims about usage, like saying they go through their entire max usage plan in a day. i think i saw one comment that claimed hours. some recently made accounts seemed very eager to tell everyone the newly released models weren't any better despite being out only for a few hours.
in another thread about how anthropic gated reading AGENTS.md with telemetry, it's full of people defending anthropic. you'd never see people do that for openai. one comment even said we need a "general drumbeat against openai", keep in mind this was in a thread where anthropic was caught doing something shady and that comment could have easily applied to anthropic instead.
now this thread has gotten very popular very fast - which makes me think that there is something fishy going on (not with op). weird rise of anti-openai / pro-anthropic sentiment on this site at the exact same time both companies release new models...
My friend, there's constantly a big push against all AI/LLM companies right now (rightly so, IMO, but I digress). What you're claiming to see in those threads can be found in nearly every thread about every company in the space.
Edit: FWIW, searching "general drumbeat" on HN only brings up your comment. Is that quote accurate?
Company advertises.
DuPont advertises
I love the hyperbolic language.
"enlisting an influencer army"
put 'good for the world' in quotes because obviously it's not
A more neutral headline would be: OpenAI Is Enlisting Influencers to Promote Its Public Image.
The rest of the article reads like anti-AI slop. For instance:
It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it. And I don't buy that it's being jammed down the throats by most employers. Sometimes maybe, but I see the reverse, where people WANT to use frontier models and are being prevented through archaic security hoops.
The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?
Lol, yes, slop is growing exponentially.
It may be a difficult concept for an astroturfer to understand, but people are activists for free. If you have found any anti-AI financiers, please share them so I can apply. Of course you already know there are none.
The companies are doing this themselves in a (stupid) attempt to do regulatory capture/ set up a cartel. Dario Amodei recently published an essay pushing this idea.
What is N here? 1?
Is it though? Do we actually know that? Is it growing faster than facebook did or google search? Is it even possible to measure when some of the "adoption" is probably people triggering it incidentally (e.g. AI mode in google search shouldn't count as adoption here).
People are worried about it because it is a highly disruptive technology with unproven ROI for businesses as of yet (restricting claims to LLMs here). It has a lot of negative potential side effects for many different groups of people. The media is reflecting these viewpoints. If there's any astroturfing going on, it's from the pro LLM camp.
That's not implied by engagement. It's possible to use the advantage AI gives you in a competitive landscape while still fearing the future it will bring.
"competitive landscape"
It's clear that people are using it for personal reasons
Is there "competitive" reasons to have an AI girlfriend? There is an implied preference that you like the technology by using it by choice and you don't think it will end civilization. You may tell pollsters you're worried but it's the same people telling pollsters sea levels are rising while investing in beach front real estate. Meaningless.
This in itself is not an argument. British Opium was selling like hotcakes in China, so surely people people must have had a general favorable impression if they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it?
Here's the difference if it's not obvious:
Opium is a dangerous drug that harms its user. AI is a useful tool that helps people be more productive or explore their interests.
That is actually a commonality.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12255134/
Either way though, we've disproven the neat rhetorical trick of conflating usage numbers and popular perception.
Step one: find two things that differ in nearly every relevant respect.
Step two: identify the broad category they share.
Step three: ask, “If you accept one, why don’t you accept the other?”
Thank you for sharing your modus operandi with us.
Now, what does that have to do with pointing out your ad populum fallacy though?
It was discussed a while ago on HN, with a more well known source, that I cannot find right now, but on a quick DDG search this is a quick article I could conjure.
https://www.gate.com/news/detail/david-sacks-warns-ai-doom-n...
Give you a hint: starts with C, ends with a P, with a C in the middle
I agree, but there's also a whole domestic "AI doom industry". The pipeline from AI researcher to guest on popular podcasts promoting your stop-AI-from-killing-us startup/"non-profit" is less than a year.
It's the AI companies themselves! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/27/wake-up-t...
It is popular because it’s useful but people still have unfavorable attitudes towards it in polls. It’s like Amazon. We use Amazon cuz it’s convenient but do we like the way Bezos treats his employees?
It's in quotes because it appears to be an specific phrase used by a campaign pitch (supposedly).
It's different from normal advertising of a commercial product which obviously will call their product "good", but "good for the world" implies something deeper.
It’s being jammed into products where it’s not wanted. I use AI every day with good results, but I do not want it in my browser, my OS, my text editor, or AI summaries in my search engine. I want it in a separate web app where I can use it or not.
So am I pro- or anti- AI? Both. It depends what it is.
Thank you for your service, your influencer token stipend has been applied to your account.
And they only count the influencers who use the OpenAI's partner hashtags!
US business model: go into billions of debt, brainwash the population via YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Hacker News influencers. Intimidate foreign governments to allow the current snake oil. Wait a decade until you have minor profits and the stock price is through the roof because #growth-mindset.
Wait what, Hacker News influencers? :D
It would not surprise me in the least if people were paid to boost on HN.
Apple product release threads are wild if they're organic, that's all I'm saying
Apple doesn't even have to pay them, just give them a chance to feel special with a new palette of colours. Who really thought they'd be unique for choosing the orange phone?
I think apple has enough people brainwashed already not to need paid ones.
wym, there is a massive anti-ai sentiment on this platform. if apple is paying influencers it sure doesnt feel like it
Or doing it for free to hype whatever they are doing just now...
insulting simonw is not allowed, please delete
of course. way more investors read it versus say reddit or facebook
Judging from some of the comments I’ve seen in the past 24 hours there is no doubt.
You're telling me that you'd be surprised that people would be paid to boost messages on HN, a site filled with shitloads of above income earners in a multi-trillion dollar industry?
I don't want to be mean, but don't you think you're being a little naive here?
It's still a site that is free to sign up
And hey, I'm unemployed at the moment. I'm a zero income earner. And yet, I'm still here.
I wish I could find the email, but awhile ago one YC startup pitched me on a six-figure job role solely dedicated to posting/commenting on Hacker News about it. Apparently I did not respond "no, that's stupid."
yeah, I have contemplated that as well and thought it would be an interesting project (since hacker news provides open data) to analyze it for signals of influence/manipulation and around which entities and topics they cluster.
I challenge you to make a post reach the front page without someone commenting "how about this, but with AI?".
Part of the point of HN is a regular marketing slot, Show HN.
Sounds like a model devised by politicians as well not to mention any examples.
I like that you think that only one side is doing it. And without clear partner hashtags or sponsorship declarations neither [1].
Seems like an obvious response from OpenAI ngl.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPdmYMHrWKg
Just know you are citing one of the most disgraced science communicator YouTuber here. I for one don‘t trust anything she says. In fact when Sabine Hossenfelder says something, I tend to believe the opposite.
Ahh the paid pretend fence sitters have arrived.
What's worse is every major company is doing things like this. If you're a large enough company to be considered "evil" by someone you have media/social media teams duking it out in the advertizing-sphere.
Now, don't take it as me saying what OpenAI is doing is good. It's more if you're in the industry you know that if you're not doing things like this, you're the only one. Whole damned thing is corrupt.
Look, Effective Altruism money that goes through multiple funds (Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) => Center for AI Safety (CAIS)) can have any ulterior motive.
Like using doomerism to get regulatory capture for Big AI.
What response? Big AI has been paying influencers forever and they can afford more than Hossenfelder:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...
Even chess channels have been full of undisclosed vibe coding and robot product placements for at least two years.
I'm not definitively claiming one side started it. One side is clearly marking it as advertisement and companies advertise and influencer marketing is just another channel now.
I'm saying, the game is the game and everyone's playing it.
I don't like it either. I think all influencers should be declaring payments.
There's been multiple YouTubers saying they've been paid recently to make... AI Doomerism videos (e.g. Sabine).
I imagine this is simply part of the campaign, AI doomerism followed by AI Bloomerism, it could even be part of the same organisation's campaign; selling the solution to a problem they put in your mind. Hype, criti-hype, it's all so tiresome.
Eh we know its part of the same campaigns. "Please provide us with regulatory capture because our tech is an existential threat" has been going on for a while now.
the boomer news have been turning the ai doom scenario to 11 for that pre ipo ramp up
Why do they need real influencers? Don’t they own some of the world’s best AI models that are really good at generating content?
Turns out, people are a lot better at detecting slop than expected. An uncanny slop valley.
And that is incredibly unfortunate to their business strategy.
But... food for thought: people are good at detecting slop, because it looks like slop. If it does not, people won't detect it. So there is a confirmation bias, where the "obvious slop" looks obvious, but the "better slop" goes by undetected.
This is the mistake they made. Anthropic and OpenAI are great technically. I love them. But they are absolute crap at making most people feeling like its relevant to them or that AI companies care about them. So its' really easy to be dismissive of the tech and oppose things like data centers. I think the influencer route is a quick fix. They need to appeal to everyday problems but, understandably, the founders like Dario and Altman think very high level. They think they are doing what's best in a way, but not in a way that's relateable to most people. LLMs need to be more human friendly; example, solve little problems like actually writing without sounding like AI
I think the OP was referring not to their public image, but to the incongruity of paying human influencers instead of deploying computer-generated influencers created by their world-beating models supposedly worth $30T.
OpenAI is trying to level up their growth marketing to match Anthropic’s. Tactics in growth marketing (speaking from my experience leading in this space) are not public knowledge as it’s a cat-and-mouse game on multiple fronts (ie CAC goes up and changes the economics when a high ROI source is found, etc. etc. etc.), which makes hiring the right person vital as information asymmetries are where the ROI is (ie more revenue per dollar spent on marketing). Anthropic hired the right person for strategy and execution long ago in LLM-years, and there is a good podcast on the story here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-grow...
Thank you for your service, your influencer token stipend has been applied to your account.
They're buying the credibility of the influencers.
Influencers have the greatest influence on their audience, especially repeat viewers who follow or subscribe to them. You need to establish credibility with an audience before you're worth anything to the marketers. This takes time to build.
OpenAI's hypothetical robot influencers have no audience.
I guess on the internet some portion of the audience is going to be ignorant of how things work, but I did have higher hopes for everyone on HN.
I guess not all people realize how deeply entrenched use of influencers and other means of astro-turfing are in use at all times.
Maybe we need a catchy little phrase to explain how it works.
"If you're using influencers you're evil. If you're not using influencers you're stupid".
They don't even have a video model
I've had access to Gemini's video models for awhile now and have done nothing with them. So who cares?
World's best AI models doesn't offset public resentment caused by putting data centers in residential areas, openly buying off the White House and Congress with PAC "donations" and constantly threatening to eliminate everyone's job.
Exactly. If you need a PR campaign to convince people you're the good guy…
I'm going to guess part of the influence campaign is getting stories like this removed from the front page of HN as quickly as possible:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1144867/dont-be-...
eg:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49814211
Not even flagged, just disappeared.
Yeah, that post disappeared rather quickly. I was surprised by it.
I feel like the "We hacked hugging face" thing and this influencer thing are targeting different things but have the same goal of hyping up the company for the IPO.
- The HF incident was to get the attention of investors and convey the message: "we have this incredibly powerful technology, imagine where we will be in 5 years"
- With this influencer campaign it's just a drive to get more people to use ChatGPT / sign up to ChatGPT so when IPO time comes, they can show strong user growth.
Over the past few months I've seen various reports that OpenAI's financial position isn't great and if those reports have any merit, then likely the higher ups at OpenAI are panicking that they might become a WeWork 2.0. Everything they are doing now is an attempt to justify their $1T valuation to investors during the IPO.
I think it’s more that YC is so heavily invested in AI-related stuff it cannot then have a message board affiliated with it that has anti-AI content on it. Maybe it has always been like this for anything YC had its fingers in and it was just less obvious?
Emphasis mine - ouch. So either influencers are automatons like LLMs who just do as their current-highest-bidder says based on a prompt (!), or in fact perhaps we skipped that bit and they’re all LLMs, for convenience. Or in this post-thinking world we just say prompt instead of ask or instruct.
Not sure which dystopian option displeases me least.
wow, scary news
oh wow that is scary
One could call it Elonism as an evolution of entrepreneurial capitalism. Had Elizabeth Holmes taken the time to build an influencer army instead of doing PR the traditional way, she might not be in prison.
She's in prison because she defrauded enterprise customers. If she went B2C, she'd probably be head of the FTC by now.
Yes, if the product is seen as bad for the world, it won't sell. But it's pretty bad for people, and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.
Its not pretty bad for people.
Go talk to an artist, a junior developer, or a musician. And then realize that the goal is to generalize the damage to every other intellectual domain.
Don’t forget the effect on students! It has the potential to be a great learning tool, but nothing is in place for that to happen. It more likely just kills all reinforcement learning
I have the opposite experience. My intellectual curiosity has increased immensely since starting to use Chat GPT. I can snap a picture and instantly know what kind of bug I am looking at, whether I am looking at a Red-Tailed hawk or a Red-Shouldered hawk and how to tell the difference, what the gauges on my water tank and boiler mean, and numerous other things that I am curious about daily.
These are things around me that I wouldn't have bothered to investigate just due to time and effort. And now I appreciate all these little curiosities more than ever.
Same.
Reminds me of this cartoon: https://imgur.com/life-before-google-q0eP1Rg
__
"Life Before Google: A Short Story"
dog: I just thought of something I'd like to know more about.
rabbit: That's a damn shame.
THE END
Being able to look something up real quick isn’t the same as knowing something, is it, especially in the specific absence of some reinforcement mechanism to retain it?
This is suggesting that I can only know something if I had to painstakingly research and discover it myself?
I mean for me personally I have always had an obsession for knowing these things anyways, it just lowered the barrier to entry for me a little bit in terms of information gathering
First I went from asking my parents then reading lots of books then specifically researching on google and forums now for most general knowledge information I can just ask AI
It can be bad for some people (many stories in the news about this) while still being good for other people. Hard to say overall or in the long run.
I'd like to argue the other way around, it can be bad for some people while still being extinction-level bad for entire species. I'm not talking about sentient AI going Matrix, i'm talking about the real material impact of datacenters being built so that a small minority can enjoy funny tools.
Do data centers compare to the human population going from 2 billion to 8 billion over the past 100 years? Or, are they just a drop in the ocean?
It has literally contributed to suicide and murders:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots
Here's just a taste:
So have many pharmaceuticals that are generally regarded as beneficial. Suicide is a side effect of more than a few, but doctors disregard that, believing that the results are worth the risk.
Drugs that carry a risk of suicide are required to have a black box warning.
Should we add that to ChatGPT too?
So have ballpoint pens.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-32489335 https://www.tribune242.com/news/2020/jan/22/ballpoint-pen-ki... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Fi_murders
How proportional is it to deaths caused by other technologies by usage?
With large enough numbers the existence of any extremely rare event becomes certain. Consequently claiming there are instances carries no information value.
Proportionality is the only sensible measure. How much more dangerous are Chatbots compared to, say, teapots?
That’s close to whataboutism.. just because other technology can also be dangerous doesn’t absolve OpenAI/ChatGPT.
Also, ChatGPT is clearly exerting a massive (potential) influence on people if their MAU numbers are to be believed, so rightfully it should get attention on the potential harm.
Thank you for your service, your influencer token stipend has been applied to your account.
Debatable.
Many of the vocal critics claiming AI will make us all dumb and is terrible go "I have two Max subscriptions myself.." at some point in the discussion.
That's a strawman argument. I'm pretty critical of LLMs and i don't use such tools. However, even in the strawman version, why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?
I mean, to make a terribly bad analogy, i don't immediately discount the bad experiences of soldiers in regards to killing people, or of addicts in regards to drug abuse.
Because the people doing that dismissing are being dishonest. Their goal is to attack and discredit their enemy, period. Critical testimony from a user has some vague similarities to hypocrisy, so can be twisted for propaganda purposes and portrayed as hypocrisy.
Because if you’re paying voluntarily for a tool that you don’t need, you have agency to remove your “suffering” by canceling your subscription and not use it! So the “suffer” complaint in those instances can be dismissed.
Hypocrisy is not actually a counterargument though. "Don't do this thing I do" doesn't mean they're wrong when they argue against that thing, and if anything can be a source of anecdata to bolster their case.
There are lots of products we know are bad for the world that still sell plenty well. Petroleum products (to include plastic), cigarettes, alcohol, guns, etc.
People generally understand that all of the above are not clear absolute negatives. There are some positives to each. And to LLMs.
These are all regulated in ways openai (or ai in general) isn't. Many of which have specific regulations around advertising.
That's not true. There are all kinds of products that benefit certain people, so sell, but are overall harmful to the world or a harmful to much larger number of people than those who benefit.
The trick is to make the people being harmed too powerless to stop the harm being done to them. Then your problem is solved and everyone (who matters) is happy.
The same way Goebbels did fir Nazis
Is Altman planning to annex the Sudetenland?
No, he's not a literalist throwback. But he is planning to glorify and expand his OpenAI reich.
This is insanely hyperbolic. OepnAI is not a "reich" there is no empire here, it's a company and some data centers. They don't have paramilitary thugs, territorial ambitions, or genocidal intent. They're just a run of the mill company run by an asshole.
The problem that is unique to the AI labs is, how to make people not hate it while continuing to believe it will probably kill all humans in 3-4 years
I thought they’d learned their lesson when they changed their strategy (er... business model) and went after the enterprise market.
But now ... this. I am clueless.
I see no reason why they can’t target both at the same time. Personally I know two people who never would’ve paid for ChatGPT a year ago but now do so. I think for the average person it’s going to be a slow and difficult conversion process to paying customers.
i.e. the new 'marketing'
they have marketing budgets that top cocacola and pepsi combined.
anyone know whats going on with muse. twitter has gone crazy with fake things ppl've supposedly achieved like getting airline to refund 4k, negotiating 45k furniture to 5k, booking flights for 20 dollars. These are the same ppl that were hyping openclaw, not sure what happened to that.
and how muse topping charts. Its all befuddling to me.
Do influences really work? In general I don't care what they have to say; usually they try to do an ad. Ublock origin either blocks that, or I just jump past their propaganda if they babble about some product I don't care (which, by default, is 100% - I really never care about any advertisement at all. I would not know WHY I would WANT to care. I am aware of "this is missing in your life" but that still does not change anything - I am not interested in hearing this).
Lately I noticed more and more youtube folks try in-video advertisements. These are a bit harder to catch by ublock origin. In the past, I would manually skip this, but recently I decided that if someone has a need to sell some ad-crap, I simply no longer care and insta-close the tab. That is actually much more efficient. And if many people do so, we'll see fewer pester-ads in general. I understand the "but this is how I make my money" - even that still does not make me want to care about wasting my life on any ads whatsoever, no matter which fancypants excuse is used.
In concluding, I now suspect that OpenAI must suck, since they depend on propaganda outlets (aka "influencers"; I don't call them "influencers", they are scummy people who work on something like mercenaries would, just on the propaganda department. Any regular guy cleaning the streets with a broom, has 10000x more credibility than these "influencers" - but does not make as much money as these bribed individuals).
Have you seen the Japanese ads for chatgpt? The rapping is awful I don’t know if that’s because of Japanese rappers, AI lyrics or just the music itself it’s just so forced
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_2W2jnxwJg
Well, if it wasn't for llms my wife would still be bedridden 24/7 and doctors would still be thinking the problem was mostly psychological. So if OpenAI wants to pay me, just reach out and I'll share everything to my dozens of social media followers
Success stories vs. horror stories.
It would make for an interesting matchup.
Could you share more about this?
I don't even know if they need an influencer army. I am seeing people out on the streets deferring to ChatGPT for even basic things in a way that Google never achieved.
I was at a hotel bar the other night and some guy kept bothering the bartender about what was on TV. Every time the bartender told him what they could do he went off for a few minutes, sent it to ChatGPT, and went back to the bar saying "well ChatGPT said this." I can't believe the bartender didn't lose his patience with it. The guy was fucking desperate to see some football on the telly and GPT kept telling him he was right to keep challenging the bartender.
Another guy looks lost with his family and he comes up to us and asks where a good restaurant is. We ask if he wants good local stuff or not and he says, he doesn't know, he just asked ChatGPT and felt like he got stranded. The restaurant it pointed out was like 2 minutes walk away. He was like the one guy in the family who seemed to speak english and was probably the one that was just dragging them around on a GPT adventure. The rest of them looked bored, like they were tired of his shit.
If it doesn't work out, it's not GPT that was wrong, it was everybody else. It pits technology against humanity again.
Scam Altman and the company culture he shaped - that’s what you get when you put a shady marketing hype-guy in a position where an actual scientist (or at least benevolent human) is urgently needed.
No wonder he relies on hype and manipulating social media mainly, as all actual scientists have left openAI years ago when they found out who Altman really is and unfortunately unsuccessfully tried to remove him.
What oAi nowadays attracts is unfortunately not the prime talent like in the beginning that were in it for a better world, but semi-talented virtue-signaling people who are attracted by the compensation and name recognition and, as we have seen it quite a few of their recent "innovation" claims, don’t mind misinterpreting, mislabeling and outright copy/steal other people’s innovations and putting big IPO-associated oAi stickers on it without deserving any of it.
That might be the strongest nudge to get me off of my habitual use of chatGPT.
Well done OpenAI comms team. Just lost a subscriber.
I get the sentiment but it feels like this right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwcJNsoY50E
there's a million companies that "enlist an influencer army". its typically just called "marketing in the 2020s".
see: gambling, food delivery, ride sharing, video games, online therapy, etc
Because the benefits of the automobile and aircraft needed so much advertising.
interesting how there has been a big push these last couple days against openai on this platform.
eg. in the gpt 6 release thread i saw multiple people make absurd claims about usage, like saying they go through their entire max usage plan in a day. i think i saw one comment that claimed hours. some recently made accounts seemed very eager to tell everyone the newly released models weren't any better despite being out only for a few hours.
in another thread about how anthropic gated reading AGENTS.md with telemetry, it's full of people defending anthropic. you'd never see people do that for openai. one comment even said we need a "general drumbeat against openai", keep in mind this was in a thread where anthropic was caught doing something shady and that comment could have easily applied to anthropic instead.
now this thread has gotten very popular very fast - which makes me think that there is something fishy going on (not with op). weird rise of anti-openai / pro-anthropic sentiment on this site at the exact same time both companies release new models...
My friend, there's constantly a big push against all AI/LLM companies right now (rightly so, IMO, but I digress). What you're claiming to see in those threads can be found in nearly every thread about every company in the space.
Edit: FWIW, searching "general drumbeat" on HN only brings up your comment. Is that quote accurate?
I think the word you're looking for is propaganda. They're deliberately using propaganda to make you think happy thoughts.