OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'

nba456_

Company advertises.

bko

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: > 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?

123aGaf

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.

automatic6131

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.

mikeocool

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?

daveguy

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.

rich_sasha

> […] 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.

sinabis

wow, scary news

sinabis

oh wow that is scary

Zigurd

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.

0c3ca83

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.

Bengalilol

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.

wolttam

i.e. the new 'marketing'

dominotw

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.

shevy-java

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).

x62Bh7948f

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

algoth1

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

ljm

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.

mentalgear

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.

LightBug1

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.