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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.
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?
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...
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?
Apple product release threads are wild if they're organic, that's all I'm saying
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.
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.
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'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.
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