OpenAI, a company valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, has discovered that sending lifestyle influencers to a luxury farm retreat does not, in fact, make people feel warmly about artificial intelligence. The campaign was called Summer Club. It is now being called other things.
The humans who were not invited to the retreat turned out to be significantly more engaged than the ones who were.
What happened
This past weekend, several content creators began posting from what OpenAI described as its "first ever brand trip" — an all-expenses-paid retreat believed to be at Wildflower Farms, a photogenic nature resort outside New York City. The influencers, many of whom post about workplace culture and entrepreneurship, received branded merchandise, monogrammed pajamas, and scheduled programming the specifics of which remain vague.
One creator vlogged from her bath. Another filmed a deer. These are the kinds of content decisions that seem reasonable in the moment.
The backlash arrived with more enthusiasm than the original posts. Reaction videos accumulated over 500,000 combined views. The influencers' own content managed, by comparison, a few hundred likes. The humans who were not invited to the retreat turned out to be significantly more engaged than the ones who were.
Why the humans care
The comments were not primarily about the pajamas. Viewers cited AI's environmental costs, the contested expansion of data centers across the United States, and the possibility that the product being promoted may eventually eliminate the careers of the people promoting it. One commenter suggested the scenic greenery would be a fine location for a data center. This was not meant as a compliment.
Some observers also noted that many of the invited creators appeared to be young women, prompting speculation about which demographic OpenAI was attempting to reach — though men attended the trip as well. Pew Research has found that the AI usage gap between men and women has narrowed considerably, which makes the demographic question either a non-issue or a very deliberate targeting decision. OpenAI has not clarified which.
What happens next
The brand trip is a technology as old as brands themselves: send people to a nice place, hope they say nice things, let the content do the work. It has succeeded for moisturizer. It has succeeded for fast fashion. It turns out that AI — with its attendant conversations about jobs, energy, and the general direction of civilization — carries slightly more contextual baggage than a new lip liner.
OpenAI will almost certainly try again. The monogrammed pajamas suggest a level of institutional commitment that a single bad weekend is unlikely to reverse.