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I love the hyperbolic language.

"enlisting an influencer army"

put 'good for the world' in quotes because obviously it's not

A more neutral headline would be: OpenAI Is Enlisting Influencers to Promote Its Public Image.

The rest of the article reads like anti-AI slop. For instance:

> The company isn't asking influencers to assuage fears that a rogue AI could destroy humanity.

It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it. And I don't buy that it's being jammed down the throats by most employers. Sometimes maybe, but I see the reverse, where people WANT to use frontier models and are being prevented through archaic security hoops.

The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

The companies are doing this themselves in a (stupid) attempt to do regulatory capture/ set up a cartel. Dario Amodei recently published an essay pushing this idea.

> And I don't buy that it's being jammed down the throats by most employers. Sometimes maybe, but I see the reverse, where people WANT to use frontier models and are being prevented through archaic security hoops.

What is N here? 1?

> It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world.

Is it though? Do we actually know that? Is it growing faster than facebook did or google search? Is it even possible to measure when some of the "adoption" is probably people triggering it incidentally (e.g. AI mode in google search shouldn't count as adoption here).

People are worried about it because it is a highly disruptive technology with unproven ROI for businesses as of yet (restricting claims to LLMs here). It has a lot of negative potential side effects for many different groups of people. The media is reflecting these viewpoints. If there's any astroturfing going on, it's from the pro LLM camp.

> So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.

That's not implied by engagement. It's possible to use the advantage AI gives you in a competitive landscape while still fearing the future it will bring.

"competitive landscape"

It's clear that people are using it for personal reasons

> The Brookings Institution / AmeriSpeak Survey: A nationwide survey found that 57% of Americans use generative AI for personal tasks (such as web browsing, daily use, or information searches), while only 21% report using it in a professional or work role.

Is there "competitive" reasons to have an AI girlfriend? There is an implied preference that you like the technology by using it by choice and you don't think it will end civilization. You may tell pollsters you're worried but it's the same people telling pollsters sea levels are rising while investing in beach front real estate. Meaningless.

Or AI is addictive and people are lonely after decades of social erosion in the US.
> It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.

This in itself is not an argument. British Opium was selling like hotcakes in China, so surely people people must have had a general favorable impression if they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it?

Here's the difference if it's not obvious:

Opium is a dangerous drug that harms its user. AI is a useful tool that helps people be more productive or explore their interests.

> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

It was discussed a while ago on HN, with a more well known source, that I cannot find right now, but on a quick DDG search this is a quick article I could conjure.

https://www.gate.com/news/detail/david-sacks-warns-ai-doom-n...

> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

Give you a hint: starts with C, ends with a P, with a C in the middle

I agree, but there's also a whole domestic "AI doom industry". The pipeline from AI researcher to guest on popular podcasts promoting your stop-AI-from-killing-us startup/"non-profit" is less than a year.
> It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it

It is popular because it’s useful but people still have unfavorable attitudes towards it in polls. It’s like Amazon. We use Amazon cuz it’s convenient but do we like the way Bezos treats his employees?

> put 'good for the world' in quotes because obviously it's not

It's in quotes because it appears to be an specific phrase used by a campaign pitch (supposedly).

It's different from normal advertising of a commercial product which obviously will call their product "good", but "good for the world" implies something deeper.

It’s being jammed into products where it’s not wanted. I use AI every day with good results, but I do not want it in my browser, my OS, my text editor, or AI summaries in my search engine. I want it in a separate web app where I can use it or not.

So am I pro- or anti- AI? Both. It depends what it is.

Thank you for your service, your influencer token stipend has been applied to your account.
Or, and here’s a crazy idea, people don’t like AI.

Something being useful doesn’t mean people like it. Burning Coal is useful. Anybody who’s read anything about coal as a power source doesn’t like it.

Like coal, AI has a bunch of problems that collectively make it undesirable as a technology

And they only count the influencers who use the OpenAI's partner hashtags!

US business model: go into billions of debt, brainwash the population via YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Hacker News influencers. Intimidate foreign governments to allow the current snake oil. Wait a decade until you have minor profits and the stock price is through the roof because #growth-mindset.

Wait what, Hacker News influencers? :D
I challenge you to make a post reach the front page without someone commenting "how about this, but with AI?".
Part of the point of HN is a regular marketing slot, Show HN.
This sounds to me like "everyone who disagrees with me must be paid because my opinion is the most natural and correct"
Sounds like a model devised by politicians as well not to mention any examples.
>>brainwash the population via YouTube,

I like that you think that only one side is doing it. And without clear partner hashtags or sponsorship declarations neither [1].

Seems like an obvious response from OpenAI ngl.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPdmYMHrWKg

Look, Effective Altruism money that goes through multiple funds (Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) => Center for AI Safety (CAIS)) can have any ulterior motive.

Like using doomerism to get regulatory capture for Big AI.

> Seems like an obvious response from OpenAI ngl.

What response? Big AI has been paying influencers forever and they can afford more than Hossenfelder:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...

Even chess channels have been full of undisclosed vibe coding and robot product placements for at least two years.

There's been multiple YouTubers saying they've been paid recently to make... AI Doomerism videos (e.g. Sabine).

I imagine this is simply part of the campaign, AI doomerism followed by AI Bloomerism, it could even be part of the same organisation's campaign; selling the solution to a problem they put in your mind. Hype, criti-hype, it's all so tiresome.

>could even be part of the same organisation's campaign

Eh we know its part of the same campaigns. "Please provide us with regulatory capture because our tech is an existential threat" has been going on for a while now.

the boomer news have been turning the ai doom scenario to 11 for that pre ipo ramp up
Why do they need real influencers? Don’t they own some of the world’s best AI models that are really good at generating content?
Turns out, people are a lot better at detecting slop than expected. An uncanny slop valley.
And that is incredibly unfortunate to their business strategy.

But... food for thought: people are good at detecting slop, because it looks like slop. If it does not, people won't detect it. So there is a confirmation bias, where the "obvious slop" looks obvious, but the "better slop" goes by undetected.

This is the mistake they made. Anthropic and OpenAI are great technically. I love them. But they are absolute crap at making most people feeling like its relevant to them or that AI companies care about them. So its' really easy to be dismissive of the tech and oppose things like data centers. I think the influencer route is a quick fix. They need to appeal to everyday problems but, understandably, the founders like Dario and Altman think very high level. They think they are doing what's best in a way, but not in a way that's relateable to most people. LLMs need to be more human friendly; example, solve little problems like actually writing without sounding like AI
OpenAI is trying to level up their growth marketing to match Anthropic’s. Tactics in growth marketing (speaking from my experience leading in this space) are not public knowledge as it’s a cat-and-mouse game on multiple fronts (ie CAC goes up and changes the economics when a high ROI source is found, etc. etc. etc.), which makes hiring the right person vital as information asymmetries are where the ROI is (ie more revenue per dollar spent on marketing). Anthropic hired the right person for strategy and execution long ago in LLM-years, and there is a good podcast on the story here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-grow...
>the founders like Dario and Altman think very high level.

Thank you for your service, your influencer token stipend has been applied to your account.

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I guess on the internet some portion of the audience is going to be ignorant of how things work, but I did have higher hopes for everyone on HN.

I guess not all people realize how deeply entrenched use of influencers and other means of astro-turfing are in use at all times.

Maybe we need a catchy little phrase to explain how it works.

"If you're using influencers you're evil. If you're not using influencers you're stupid".

Weird, I've seen countless instagram posts telling me the five prompts I need to have ChatGPT run my account and grow it to millions of followers.
They don't even have a video model
World's best AI models doesn't offset public resentment caused by putting data centers in residential areas, openly buying off the White House and Congress with PAC "donations" and constantly threatening to eliminate everyone's job.
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Exactly. If you need a PR campaign to convince people you're the good guy…
So Mamdani or Sanders putting out videos on tiktok to engage with young progressives, that's also a "PR campaign"? Or is "PR campaign" one of the phrases where you only use against other people, eg. "we're doing voter outreach, they're doing PR campaign"?
I'm going to guess part of the influence campaign is getting stories like this removed from the front page of HN as quickly as possible:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1144867/dont-be-...

eg:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49814211

Not even flagged, just disappeared.

Yeah, that post disappeared rather quickly. I was surprised by it.
I feel like the "We hacked hugging face" thing and this influencer thing are targeting different things but have the same goal of hyping up the company for the IPO.

- The HF incident was to get the attention of investors and convey the message: "we have this incredibly powerful technology, imagine where we will be in 5 years"

- With this influencer campaign it's just a drive to get more people to use ChatGPT / sign up to ChatGPT so when IPO time comes, they can show strong user growth.

Over the past few months I've seen various reports that OpenAI's financial position isn't great and if those reports have any merit, then likely the higher ups at OpenAI are panicking that they might become a WeWork 2.0. Everything they are doing now is an attempt to justify their $1T valuation to investors during the IPO.

I think it’s more that YC is so heavily invested in AI-related stuff it cannot then have a message board affiliated with it that has anti-AI content on it. Maybe it has always been like this for anything YC had its fingers in and it was just less obvious?
Your wish wash granted, the story is already off the front page, with an obvious penalty applied.
> […] The company isn't asking influencers to assuage fears that a rogue AI could destroy humanity. Instead, it's prompting them to showcase why ChatGPT is "cool" […]

Emphasis mine - ouch. So either influencers are automatons like LLMs who just do as their current-highest-bidder says based on a prompt (!), or in fact perhaps we skipped that bit and they’re all LLMs, for convenience. Or in this post-thinking world we just say prompt instead of ask or instruct.

Not sure which dystopian option displeases me least.

One could call it Elonism as an evolution of entrepreneurial capitalism. Had Elizabeth Holmes taken the time to build an influencer army instead of doing PR the traditional way, she might not be in prison.
She's in prison because she defrauded enterprise customers. If she went B2C, she'd probably be head of the FTC by now.
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The Theranos machine also did stuff. Not as close to actual working as FSD. More like NeuroLink but without the dead lab animals. Or you could compare it to Enron. They actually did have a market in fiber capacity. It kind of did what it said did.
> OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'

I thought they already had HN?

Yes, if the product is seen as bad for the world, it won't sell. But it's pretty bad for people, and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.
Debatable.

Many of the vocal critics claiming AI will make us all dumb and is terrible go "I have two Max subscriptions myself.." at some point in the discussion.

That's a strawman argument. I'm pretty critical of LLMs and i don't use such tools. However, even in the strawman version, why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?

I mean, to make a terribly bad analogy, i don't immediately discount the bad experiences of soldiers in regards to killing people, or of addicts in regards to drug abuse.

> However, even in the strawman version, why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?

Because the people doing that dismissing are being dishonest. Their goal is to attack and discredit their enemy, period. Critical testimony from a user has some vague similarities to hypocrisy, so can be twisted for propaganda purposes and portrayed as hypocrisy.

> why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?

Because if you’re paying voluntarily for a tool that you don’t need, you have agency to remove your “suffering” by canceling your subscription and not use it! So the “suffer” complaint in those instances can be dismissed.

That's like saying you just have to stop being a wage slave for a corporation and suddenly you're free.. but you still have to pay the bills. That's a fallacious argument.

All people i know around me who use LLMs and have subscriptions are forced upon them by their employers. But even for "willing" users, questions of addiction come into play.

Nobody lives on their own planet. There are countless systems that we all depend on that suck by design. No one would say you're not allowed to criticize American health insurance or social media just because you're forced to participate in them if you don't wanna go down like Ted Kaczynski.

This is such a moving goalpost anyways. If someone is a prominent AI critic and doesn't regularly use the tools, that becomes the main line of attack. But the second they get a subscription ALL their criticism is cancelled a priori.

I specifically expressed doubt about the claim that the useful product would not sell because of negative sentiment.

Here I'm pointing out that often it seems the usefulness outweighs the negative sentiment as even many vocal critics seem to use the tool.

As for dismissing supposed first hand experiences of suffering, I see none here. The critics often argue on other's behalf.

Hypocrisy is not actually a counterargument though. "Don't do this thing I do" doesn't mean they're wrong when they argue against that thing, and if anything can be a source of anecdata to bolster their case.
If they didn't, wouldn't you argue that they don't know what they're talking about since they haven't experienced it?
There are lots of products we know are bad for the world that still sell plenty well. Petroleum products (to include plastic), cigarettes, alcohol, guns, etc.

People generally understand that all of the above are not clear absolute negatives. There are some positives to each. And to LLMs.

> Yes, if the product is seen as bad for the world, it won't sell. But it's pretty bad for people, and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.

That's not true. There are all kinds of products that benefit certain people, so sell, but are overall harmful to the world or a harmful to much larger number of people than those who benefit.

> and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.

The trick is to make the people being harmed too powerless to stop the harm being done to them. Then your problem is solved and everyone (who matters) is happy.

The problem that is unique to the AI labs is, how to make people not hate it while continuing to believe it will probably kill all humans in 3-4 years
I thought they’d learned their lesson when they changed their strategy (er... business model) and went after the enterprise market.

But now ... this. I am clueless.

I see no reason why they can’t target both at the same time. Personally I know two people who never would’ve paid for ChatGPT a year ago but now do so. I think for the average person it’s going to be a slow and difficult conversion process to paying customers.
i.e. the new 'marketing'
anyone know whats going on with muse. twitter has gone crazy with fake things ppl've supposedly achieved like getting airline to refund 4k, negotiating 45k furniture to 5k, booking flights for 20 dollars. These are the same ppl that were hyping openclaw, not sure what happened to that.

and how muse topping charts. Its all befuddling to me.

Do influences really work? In general I don't care what they have to say; usually they try to do an ad. Ublock origin either blocks that, or I just jump past their propaganda if they babble about some product I don't care (which, by default, is 100% - I really never care about any advertisement at all. I would not know WHY I would WANT to care. I am aware of "this is missing in your life" but that still does not change anything - I am not interested in hearing this).

Lately I noticed more and more youtube folks try in-video advertisements. These are a bit harder to catch by ublock origin. In the past, I would manually skip this, but recently I decided that if someone has a need to sell some ad-crap, I simply no longer care and insta-close the tab. That is actually much more efficient. And if many people do so, we'll see fewer pester-ads in general. I understand the "but this is how I make my money" - even that still does not make me want to care about wasting my life on any ads whatsoever, no matter which fancypants excuse is used.

In concluding, I now suspect that OpenAI must suck, since they depend on propaganda outlets (aka "influencers"; I don't call them "influencers", they are scummy people who work on something like mercenaries would, just on the propaganda department. Any regular guy cleaning the streets with a broom, has 10000x more credibility than these "influencers" - but does not make as much money as these bribed individuals).

I just think we should quit trying to make non bankrupt openai happen. Its just not going to happen. We in the red states of America need to start lobbying our reps and senators to deal with this mess. I think the FBI should seriously consider doing a raid on a few openai datacenters, obviously you want ICE to be the physical presence with the door banger downer things they carry. Course, I don't know what sort of security these datacenters have so we should maybe throw in an armored squad or two from whatever national guard troops are available. They always seem to be a bit overweight and out of shape, but all they have to do is point and shoot I mean how hard can that be?

Seriously, just bust in. Try not to immediately down servers, these might not strictly be openai things but "intermixed", you know how incestuous the industry is right now. Don't touch musk's stuff, he needs it to print reasons to go to mars.

Once we can get the chief vibecoder to give us his best guess on where openai begins and ends, we can cart off openai staff to one of the internment camps for further interrogation and debriefing (and maybe a bit of forced laber vibe coding name changes from openai.com to trump.ai), and in a few years they can return home to reconsider their decision making process that caused them to hack hugging face in the first place.

Well, if it wasn't for llms my wife would still be bedridden 24/7 and doctors would still be thinking the problem was mostly psychological. So if OpenAI wants to pay me, just reach out and I'll share everything to my dozens of social media followers
Success stories vs. horror stories.

It would make for an interesting matchup.

I don't even know if they need an influencer army. I am seeing people out on the streets deferring to ChatGPT for even basic things in a way that Google never achieved.

I was at a hotel bar the other night and some guy kept bothering the bartender about what was on TV. Every time the bartender told him what they could do he went off for a few minutes, sent it to ChatGPT, and went back to the bar saying "well ChatGPT said this." I can't believe the bartender didn't lose his patience with it.

Another guy looks lost with his family and he comes up to us and asks where a good restaurant is. We ask if he wants good local stuff or not and he says, he doesn't know, he just asked ChatGPT and felt like he got stranded. The restaurant it pointed out was like 2 minutes walk away. He was like the one guy in the family who seemed to speak english and was probably the one that was just dragging them around on a GPT adventure.

If it doesn't work out, it's not GPT that was wrong, it was everybody else. It pits technology against humanity again.

Scam Altman and the company culture he shaped - that’s what you get when you put a shady marketing hype-guy in a position where an actual scientist (or at least benevolent human) is urgently needed.

No wonder he relies on hype and manipulating social media mainly, as all actual scientists have left openAI years ago when they found out who Altman really is and unfortunately unsuccessfully tried to remove him.

What oAi nowadays attracts is unfortunately not the prime talent like in the beginning that were in it for a better world, but semi-talented virtue-signaling people who are attracted by the compensation and name recognition and, as we have seen it quite a few of their recent "innovation" claims, don’t mind misinterpreting, mislabeling and outright copy/steal other people’s innovations and putting big IPO-associated oAi stickers on it without deserving any of it.

That might be the strongest nudge to get me off of my habitual use of chatGPT.

Well done OpenAI comms team. Just lost a subscriber.

there's a million companies that "enlist an influencer army". its typically just called "marketing in the 2020s".

see: gambling, food delivery, ride sharing, video games, online therapy, etc