OpenAI, Influencer Backlash and Our Internet Disconnect

**Taylor Lorenz** (0:00)
The content that does the best online is the content that feeds these fears and that sells people slob. And if we just got on here every single day and said the most inflammatory stuff and scared everyone and said, there's no benefit and it's a bubble and you're gonna, everything's a fake. And it's, you know, we would honestly probably make a million dollars at least. I mean, there are people doing that, right?

**Laurie Segall** (0:23)
That are making that kind of money.
I'm Laurie Segall and you're listening to Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens. Taylor, I've wanted to interview you for so long because I think you cover the edges before they become the center. You're also kind of just like in internet culture. You are internet culture to some degree and have been doing this long before. So many others. And so anyway, thank you for being on.

**Taylor Lorenz** (0:51)
I'm so excited to be here.

**Laurie Segall** (0:53)
Yeah, look, and I think I've always been looking, I'm like, okay, what is it? There's so many things that I want to talk to you about. But something happened last week. I think it was last week that I was like, this screams like a hot take from Taylor Lorenz. And that was OpenAI's backlash for their brand trip with creators, which I think might sound kind of inside baseball to folks who are kind of like, okay, I'm interested in AI. Why on earth should I care about like a brand trip for OpenAI?
But I think it represented something so much larger, which you touched on, which is just the disconnect of technology and reality, and how that's playing out from an Internet culture standpoint. And Internet culture is culture now. And so no one better than you to talk about it, and I think and kind of what it represents. So can you start out a little bit with just explaining what happened and why the backlash?

**Taylor Lorenz** (1:51)
Yeah. So OpenAI, obviously, ChachiPT launches in 2022, becomes the fastest growing consumer product of all time.
Hugely popular product, right? So millions and millions of people are using these tools that they're creating.
But there's this disconnect, especially as these tools become more pervasive, people start to learn who Sam Altman is. They start to have a PR problem on their hands, where suddenly people are like, hey, ChatGPT is amazing, but why is my boss making me use it? Why is there all this AI? What happened? Suddenly AI is all over, it's invading my life, and OpenAI is this company that I hear about doing all of it. Also, Sam's of course on this media tour. So a few, maybe a year ago, six months ago, they decide to kind of engage in this PR effort. They hire Charles Porch, who's truly built Instagram into the brand that it is today. He was head of partnerships, like you remember Laurie probably in the 2010s. Charles Porch was just getting every single internet influencer or celebrity on Instagram, I guarantee you, Charles Porch. He set up their account.

**Laurie Segall** (3:00)
That's right.

**Taylor Lorenz** (3:01)
This guy is legendary. So they hire him, they start to build out this, their comms team, their marketing team, and they start to engage with influencers. First, they invite a few influencers to some of their corporate developer-facing events, and then they decide a couple of weeks ago to host their first ever influencer brand trip. And this brand trip was at this, like, pastoral estate. It was in upstate New York. Everybody had their own kind of beautiful cabin. It was this, like, really...
I heard people comparing it to Midsommar. Did you see any of that? Yeah. And OpenAI brings these, about two dozen influencers up to this beautiful, you know, idyllic landscape in upstate New York, where they have this weekend, where they do things like beekeeping, hiking, walking. Also, some would say getting propagandized about AI. Some would say sort of learning about AI, but they have these sessions where OpenAI staff is sort of explaining the tools to them and educating these lifestyle influencers. It's important to note that while OpenAI has engaged with tech content creators for a while, like developers and sort of developers that also have, you know, that are sort of vibe coding maybe, and they have a platform on TikTok, this is the first time they've really engaged like the lifestyle influencer community. So these are, you know, sort of women, one woman that was getting a lot of backlash. She teaches like soft skills, she says, or whatever, but they're the type of influencers that are going to vlog their experience. And so that's what sort of kicked off the backlash.