Influencer brand trips have long been a staple of the fashion and beauty industries. A sponsor flies a group of content creators to a scenic destination, showers them with products and experiences, and expects a wave of social media posts in return. These trips confer status on the creators who are invited and produce polished, aspirational content for the brand. But when OpenAI hosted its first brand trip over the weekend, the result was not a seamless promotional campaign. It was a backlash that exposed how fragile public trust in AI companies has become.
The event, promoted as “Summer Club,” took place at Wildflower Farms, a luxury retreat outside New York City. Rooms at the property can cost upward of $2,000 a night, and the setting was designed to be photogenic: cabins set among greenery, baths drawn at night, deer wandering past windows. The invitation list skewed toward creators in the career and business niche who talk about workplace culture, leadership, and being CEOs. Influencers posted branded merchandise, monogrammed pajamas, and clips of their cabins. Grace McCarrick, a TikTok creator with 145,000 followers, filmed herself running a bath in her suite. Nat Lucy, who has 57,000 followers, captured a deer outside her cabin. On the surface, it looked like many other brand trips.
But the comments quickly turned hostile. “People will literally sell their soul and their planet down the river for a nice free hotel room,” one viewer wrote on McCarrick’s video. Another commenter on Lucy’s post wrote, “Wow! Beautiful greenery! They should put a data center there!” The influencers’ own videos generated modest engagement—McCarrick’s video had just under 300 likes, and Lucy’s drew fewer than 15,000 views. Reaction videos, however, performed far better; a pair of clips had more than half a million combined views. The backlash became the main story.
The environmental cost of the AI boom
A large share of the criticism centered on the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Data centers, which power tools like ChatGPT, consume massive amounts of electricity and water for cooling. Communities across the United States have protested the construction of new data centers, citing strain on local power grids, water supplies, and ecosystems. Against that backdrop, watching influencers enjoy a nature retreat paid for by an AI company felt contradictory to many commenters. The lush greenery in the videos appeared to be a visual reminder of what critics say the AI industry is threatening.
Water usage was a particular flashpoint. Research has shown that data centers can use millions of gallons of water each day, especially during peak computing loads. In drought-prone regions, this has become a political issue. OpenAI has acknowledged the environmental costs of its operations and has pledged to work toward sustainability, but those pledges have not quieted critics who argue the industry is expanding too quickly to assess the full damage. The Summer Club trip gave those critics a live case study in the disconnect between AI’s resource-hungry infrastructure and the pampered, pastoral setting of a corporate influencer retreat.
Job displacement fears and ethical concerns
Beyond the environment, commenters raised concerns about AI’s potential to replace workers. The creators on the trip focused on career advice, soft skills, and workplace success; OpenAI is developing products that many workers fear will automate their jobs. The juxtaposition was difficult to ignore. Why would a company whose tools are having a visible effect on employment patterns pay to fly business influencers to a luxury resort? For many observers, the answer was that OpenAI was trying to soften its image and normalize a technology that remains deeply unsettling to the public.
Some commenters also questioned the gender dynamics of the event. Many of the visible attendees were young women, even though there were also men on the trip. This led to speculation that OpenAI was deliberately targeting a demographic that tends to be more skeptical of AI. According to Pew Research Center, the usage gap between men and women has nearly closed, but women are more likely to say AI will harm them personally. In fact, women are about twice as likely as men to express this concern. Critics saw the influencer trip as an attempt to launder the reputation of an industry through creators women trust, even as the technology’s risks are borne unevenly.
The influencers respond
McCarrick, who describes her content as focused on “soft skills we need at work,” responded to the criticism in a series of videos and a LinkedIn post. She wrote that she “genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI” and described the negative response as evidence of “the shocking AI psychosis running rampant online.” By that phrase, she meant anger about AI, not the more familiar clinical definition of psychosis. She also said that people in the real world “do not run around like a chicken with their heads cut off, screaming about water usage and wildlife and (curiously) fascism.”
Her dismissive tone only fueled the criticism. Rather than addressing the substance of the concerns—water usage, wildlife, or the political implications of AI expansion—she framed the backlash as an online delusion. That response was consistent with a broader pattern in which AI influencers and executives treat public concern as irrational or uninformed. But the scale of the reaction suggested otherwise. The people commenting were not all Luddites or bots; they were workers, residents of data-center communities, and activists who have been following the AI industry’s rapid growth with alarm.
A brand trip with no clear content
Another notable detail was the absence of substantive content from the trip. On a typical brand trip, influencers produce an endless stream of content: every meal, every poolside moment, every workshop. This time, the videos and photos were largely aspirational lifestyle content. There were few posts explaining what the attendees learned about ChatGPT, no clips from sessions, and no clear sense of what the “Summer Club” programming actually involved. Multiple influencers said it was their first brand trip, and one indicated they had not been paid for attending. Some commenters also poked fun at the fact that it was a domestic trip rather than a far-flung international vacation. That last detail is unusual for a major company like OpenAI, which has the resources to offer top talent significant compensation.
The muddled goals of the trip made the backlash worse. If OpenAI wanted to educate creators about its products, the content should have shown that education. If it simply wanted to buy goodwill, it did so with a small group of creators, mostly in the business niche, and the results were minimal. By keeping the programming vague and allowing influencers to post what they wanted, OpenAI may have been testing a new marketing channel rather than making a full commitment. But that half-measure left the company without a compelling counter-narrative when the criticism arrived.
AI companies are borrowing traditional marketing playbooks
OpenAI is not the only AI company experimenting with influencer marketing. Anthropic has hosted smaller, low-key influencer dinners at trendy restaurants with lifestyle creators. These dinners are designed to generate organic conversations about AI in a comfortable setting. Unlike conventional product placements, they rely on the ambient trust that creators have built with their audiences. There have also been reports of a second OpenAI trip on the West Coast, suggesting that the company is not abandoning the strategy despite the backlash.
AI companies have also tried other forms of consumer-facing outreach. They have run pop-up coffee shops, released branded merchandise, and launched ad campaigns that attempt to reframe public fears about AI into inspirational messages. The industry has moved away from the blunt, early messaging that suggested jobs would soon be obsolete. In its place is a softer, more human-centered tone designed to make AI feel approachable. Influencers are a natural fit for that project because they offer a direct line to audiences who might never read a company blog post or attend a developer conference.
OpenAI spokesperson Edie Campbell-Urban said in an email that creators are an important part of the community and how people get information and learn about products today. She added that the company welcomes healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent and values creators who engage with its events, ask tough questions, and learn alongside others. The statement did little to calm the reaction, in part because the debate was not about the value of influencers but about the consequences of the technology itself.
But influencer marketing comes with risks. Audiences are sophisticated about sponsored content, and they may resent being targeted. When the sponsor is an AI company, the stakes are higher because public opinion is already polarized. The backlash to the Shein brand trip in 2023 offered a preview: creators who glibly promoted a fast-fashion company were criticized for ignoring labor and environmental abuses. The OpenAI trip followed a similar pattern, with the difference that the industry in question is not just a maker of
Source:The Verge News