OpenAI Influencer Trip Backfires Amid AI Backlash
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- OpenAI hosted its "first ever brand trip" called "Summer Club" at what appears to be Wildflower Farms outside NYC, flying in career/business influencers and gifting branded merch, cabin suites, and monogrammed pajamas
- Grace McCarrick (145K TikTok followers) vlogged from her suite and Nat Lucy (57K followers) filmed spotting a deer — but their posts drew roughly 300 likes and under 15,000 views respectively, while reaction videos criticizing the trip surpassed 500,000 combined views
- Backlash comments cited AI data centers' environmental toll, contentious buildout, and job replacement fears; the piece also flagged that women are twice as likely as men to expect AI will negatively impact them personally, per Pew data cited
- McCarrick fired back on LinkedIn calling critics' anger "AI psychosis running rampant online" and writing she "genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI"
- OpenAI spokesperson Edie Campbell-Urban said creator marketing is how the company reaches people and that it "welcome[s] healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent"
- The trip itself was relatively modest — domestic rather than international, rooms at $2,000+/night, and several attendees said it was their first brand trip, with one influencer indicating they weren't paid
- The Verge observed the event produced conspicuously little ChatGPT demo content, with videos instead reading as aspirational lifestyle footage — and reported rumblings of a second OpenAI brand trip planned for the West Coast
Why it matters: OpenAI's first lifestyle-influencer brand trip flopped publicly, showing that borrowing trust from creators is a risky soft-power play when AI sentiment centers on data centers and job loss. The company spent minimally on the event, but it was the influencers — not OpenAI — who absorbed the reputational fallout in the comments.
