Thread

OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'

221 points · 209 comments · cdrnsf

mikeocool · 1790169022 · focus · HN ↗
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?
1. oblio · 1790169636 · focus · HN ↗
  Turns out, people are a lot better at detecting slop than expected. An uncanny slop valley.
  1. dormento · 1790171193 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    oblio · 1790197086 · focus · HN ↗
    1. I would argue that human directed and edited "better slop" is just... average content. Which leads to my next point.
    2. LLMs have raised the floor of digital content creation ("democratized content creation"). Before lots of things would have not been created due to lack of knowledge, interest, motivation. Now the baseline for making something is a 10 word prompt. Personally I think it's a huge loss. Yes, we will get 5% "diamonds in the rough" who would have never approached a field due to gatekeeping, discrimination, whatever. Will that outweigh the other 95% of lazy creators flooding every field with around average content? I'm not convinced. There is a cost to that flood.
2. LurkandComment · 1790170301 · focus · HN ↗
  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
  1. curt15 · 1790170557 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the OP was referring not to their public image, but to the incongruity of paying human influencers instead of deploying computer-generated influencers created by their world-beating models supposedly worth $30T.
  2. rancar2 · 1790171276 · focus · HN ↗
    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: <a href="https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run" rel="nofollow">https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-grow...
  3. officeplant · 1790172766 · focus · HN ↗
    >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.
  4. cyclopeanutopia · 1790174906 · focus · HN ↗
    That's way too unhinged comment to be real.
  5. [deleted] · 1790176498 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
3. fwip · 1790170981 · focus · HN ↗
  They're buying the credibility of the influencers.
  Influencers have the greatest influence on their audience, especially repeat viewers who follow or subscribe to them. You need to establish credibility with an audience before you're worth anything to the marketers. This takes time to build.
  OpenAI's hypothetical robot influencers have no audience.
  1. pixl97 · 1790173496 · focus · HN ↗
    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".
  2. mikeocool · 1790177165 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    fwip · 1790186054 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure if I'm missing some sarcasm in your post - apologies if so. But as always, if it actually worked, they'd just be making money off of their many million-follower accounts, instead of telling you how to do it.
4. redox99 · 1790171559 · focus · HN ↗
  They don't even have a video model
  1. BenzeneDream · 1790171809 · focus · HN ↗
    I've had access to Gemini's video models for awhile now and have done nothing with them. So who cares?
5. rchaud · 1790171825 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
6. [deleted] · 1790171919 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
7. JKCalhoun · 1790174102 · focus · HN ↗
  Exactly. If you need a PR campaign to convince people you're the good guy…
  1. gruez · 1790175049 · focus · HN ↗
    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"?
    ipsod · 1790180745 · focus · HN ↗
    You've got to admit, it feels different when you think it's grass roots, but was funded.
    But then, even if it's them in their own skin, you think it's the algorithm showing that for you, when it's showing stuff for them to you.
    It's weasels all the way down.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.