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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.
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 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.
Of course. Say something bad about Elon and see what happens.
His grandpa moved from Canada to South Africa because he was pro-apartheid and Elon is following in his footsteps.
You’ll be upvoted?
Let's try it:
Elon is a stupid fascist and he only got where he is by failing upwards repeatedly.
SpaceX seems pretty successful to me, no? I think you have to say something bad + have it actually contain some element of truth.
"Elon is a stupid fascist that mostly wouldn't have been noticed if Spacex and Tesla were what he dabbled in, but his incredible ego makes it impossible for him to keep his mouth shut".
Now, that one will be a whole lot harder to debunk.
elon musk is a degenerate that is the white nick cannon
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?
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?
I challenge you to make a post reach the front page without someone commenting "how about this, but with AI?".
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.
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 why they are hiring 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.
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.
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.
I thought they already had HN?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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