The brand trip is a rite of passage for influencers. It is a mark of legitimacy when a sponsor invites creators on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. But trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger public criticism, and project a certain frivolousness. Usually, it is fast fashion companies or beauty brands flying out influencers with the goal of flooding social media with sponsored content. This time, it was a major AI company.
In the creator economy, a brand trip is often seen as a reward for loyalty and a signal that a creator has made it. But when the brand in question is not a fashion label or a beauty line, but one of the most powerful AI companies in the world, the ritual takes on a different, more political meaning. Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI’s “first ever brand trip,” which appears to have taken place outside New York City at a nature-filled retreat known as Wildflower Farms. The trip was marketed as “Summer Club,” and influencers posted photos and videos from their cabins, showing off branded merch and monogrammed pajamas and talking vaguely about the scheduled programming. Many of the content creators are in the career and business niches, posting about workplace culture or about being CEOs. Grace McCarrick, who has 145,000 followers on TikTok, vlogged from her suite as she ran a bath at night. Another influencer, Nat Lucy, with 57,000 followers, filmed herself spotting a deer outside her cabin. Then all hell broke loose.
“People will literally sell their soul and their planet down the river for a nice free hotel room,” one commenter on TikTok wrote under McCarrick’s video. “Wow! Beautiful greenery! They should put a data center there!” reads a comment on Lucy’s post. Most of the videos got relatively little traction: McCarrick’s video has just under 300 likes, and Lucy’s video has fewer than 15,000 views. It’s measly engagement compared to what other splashy brand trips can command. But videos reacting to the trip have made it something of a scandal; a pair of clips alone has over half a million combined views.
Many of the comments cite the environmental effects of the AI boom, the contentious buildout of data centers across the US, and the potential for job replacement or job loss as a result of companies integrating AI in the workplace. The backlash did not emerge in a vacuum. Across the United States, communities have protested data center construction over concerns about electricity demand, water usage, noise, and pressure on local infrastructure. AI models require vast amounts of computing power, which in turn requires energy and cooling. Tech companies have promised to use renewable energy and innovative cooling systems, but many communities remain skeptical. Against that backdrop, a video of an influencer soaking in a bathtub at a $2,000-a-night retreat, sponsored by an AI company, was easy to read as an attempt to distract attention from the industry's record.
Some also questioned why so many of the content creators who went appeared to be young women, as if OpenAI was targeting a specific demographic via media they were more connected to. According to Pew, even as the AI usage gap between men and women has all but disappeared, women tend to view AI more negatively and are twice as likely to say AI will negatively affect them personally. Some audiences wondered whether female influencers were essentially being used to launder the reputation of an industry under scrutiny. The optics were not lost on critics: an industry dominated by male executives using a cohort of mostly female lifestyle and career creators to soften its public image looked like a calculated move, even if the reality was more accidental.
McCarrick, who describes herself as a creator who talks about “soft skills we need at work to millions online and to teams like Spotify, Amazon, Uber and DoorDash,” has since made multiple videos responding to commenters accusing her of abandoning her morals for a fancy trip. On LinkedIn she wrote that she “genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI,” and that the negative response to her videos exposed her to “the shocking AI psychosis running rampant online.” People in the real world, she wrote, “do not run around like a chicken with their heads cut off, screaming about water usage and wildlife and (curiously) fascism.”
None of the influencers reached for comment responded to requests for comment. OpenAI said creator marketing is part of how they reach people and that the event was meant to be educational. “Creators are an important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today,” OpenAI spokesperson Edie Campbell-Urban said in an email. “We welcome healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent, and we value creators who choose to engage with us, attend our events, ask tough questions, and learn alongside everyone else. We’ll continue to value them, just as we do traditional media and other marketing partners.”
Setting aside the backlash for a moment, a few things stand out. First, this appears to be a relatively simple trip. That’s not to say it wasn’t luxurious — the rooms at the retreat cost upwards of $2,000 a night — but it is nothing compared to brands that go all out to milk content from every moment. Some commenters poked fun at the fact that it was a domestic trip, not a far-flung, international vacation. Second, there’s a sense that everyone involved is testing the waters: multiple influencers noted it was the first brand trip they’d attended, and one influencer indicated they were not paid for their attendance, which big brands often do for top talent. Third, the goals of the trip are muddled: it’s not entirely clear what the influencers actually did because there is surprisingly little content online from the event. Typically, an influencer on a brand trip makes it inescapable — every little luxury, every meal, every activity is TikToked and photo-dumped. Instead of content about the capabilities of ChatGPT, the videos and photos are largely aspirational lifestyle content focused on free swag and pretty setting. There isn’t the same flood of picturesque montages, clips from expert sessions or Q&As, or summaries of what a creator learned. At least not yet.
The mystery of the content raises a larger question: what was OpenAI actually hoping to achieve? Brand trips are designed to generate a predictable wave of positive, polished content. The fact that the output was so diffuse suggests either a deliberately soft launch or a mismatch between the company's goals and the creators' habits. Some participants may have been more comfortable making lifestyle content than explaining advanced AI systems. Others may have been wary of creating something too promotional, afraid of inviting even more criticism. Either way, the strategy did not produce the desired narrative.
AI companies have used influencer marketing in straightforward ways, like paying creators to make content about their product offerings. But they’ve also dabbled in the kind of influencer marketing people expect from more traditional consumer brands. Anthropic has hosted more low-key influencer dinners at trendy locations with lifestyle influencers, and there are rumblings of a second OpenAI trip on the West Coast. This is part of a broader shift in how AI companies communicate. As backlash to the industry has grown, they have adjusted their messaging. “Your jobs will soon be obsolete” has clearly not been the right framing for why people should trust these companies or get on board with their mission. Instead, AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have tried to add a bit of human touch, whether that’s through in-person pop-up coffee shops, stylized merch drops, or ad campaigns that take concerns people have about AI and turn them into pro-AI inspirational content.
There is also a long history of technology companies turning to lifestyle influencers when they want to reach audiences that are skeptical of their products. Smartphone apps, social networks, and consumer hardware have all leaned on creators to humanize tech. The strategy makes sense: influencers are trusted by their followers in ways that corporate advertising increasingly is not. But that trust is a double-edged sword. When a creator appears to accept money from a company facing scrutiny, the audience may feel betrayed, and the backlash falls on the creator rather than on the brand. It is a transfer of risk. Influencers received similar backlash for a Shein brand trip in 2023, when the fast fashion company flew creators to an exclusive resort and was accused of ignoring its labor and environmental record.
What better way to reach consumers directly than through the talking heads they already know and trust? Influencers are a convenient vessel, both for brands looking to disseminate their message and for the inevitable backlash from audiences who give them a platform in the first place. In this case, the content broke containment out of the girlboss-style business circles into the mainstream — an AI brand trip dressed up as an aspirational lifestyle retreat is both confusing and enraging to a public fatigued by this line of work. By tapping a certain kind of creator for a weekend of sponsored content, OpenAI is able to test a new audience without fully committing; it’s the content creators, after all, who get the angry comments, whose faces get plastered on the backgrounds of an ever-increasing number of reaction videos. The AI industry wants the soft power and cultural relevance influencers wield and realized the price of reaching their audience is surprisingly cheap. You get what you pay for.
Source:The Verge News