The brand trip is a right of passage for influencers. It’s a mark of legitimacy that a sponsor wants to invite them on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. Trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger criticism from the public, 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.
Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI’s “first ever brand trip,” which appears to have taken place outside of New York City at a nature-filled retreat (for those curious, it looks to be the Instagram-bait 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 appear to be 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 (57,000 followers), filmed herself spotting a deer outside of her cabin. 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 on the influencers’ videos 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. Some also questioned why so many of the content creators who went on the trip appeared to be young women, as if OpenAI was targeting a specific demographic via media they were more connected to (though based on photos and videos posted to social media, there were men on the trip, too). 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 impact them personally. Some audiences wondered whether female influencers were essentially being used to launder the reputation of an industry under scrutiny.
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 essentially 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” — by which she means anger about AI, not the more common definition of being driven to paranoia or delusions of grandeur by using AI. 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,” she wrote.
None of the influencers The Verge reached out to 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 to the trip for a moment, a few things stand out. First, all things considered, 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 the brands that go all out in order to milk content from every last 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 and most interestingly, the goals of the trip are muddled: It’s not entirely clear what the influencers were actually doing on the trip, because there is surprisingly little content online from the event. Typically, if an influencer is on a brand trip it’s 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 the free swag and pretty setting — and even then, there’s a conspicuous lack of content, period. There isn’t the same flood of picturesque montages, clips from expert sessions or Q&As, or summaries of what a creator learned from their time with OpenAI. At least not yet.
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 expert from more traditional consumer brands: Anthropic has hosted more lowkey influencer dinners at trendy locations with lifestyle influencers, and there are rumblings of a second OpenAI trip on the West Coast.
As backlash to the industry has grown, AI companies have adjusted how they communicate with the public: “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 try to turn them into pro-AI inspirational content.
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 will get the angry comments, whose faces will be plastered on the backgrounds of an ever-increasing number of reaction videos (influencers received similar backlash for a Shein brand trip in 2023). 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.
