How an OpenAI influencer trip backfired

TechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIEntertainmentCloseEntertainmentPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All EntertainmentHow an OpenAI influencer trip backfired What did the content creators learn about ChatGPT at the “summer club” weekend trip?What did the content creators learn about ChatGPT at the “summer club” weekend trip?by Mia SatoCloseMia SatoFeatures Writer, The VergePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Mia SatoAug 4, 2026, 5:46 PM UTCLinkShareGiftInstagram: @nat.lucyyMia SatoCloseMia SatoPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Mia Sato is features writer with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.The brand trip is a right of passage for influencers. It’s a mark of legitimacy that a sponsor wants to invite them on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. Trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger criticism from the public, and project a certain frivolousness.Usually it is fast fashion companies or beauty brands flying out influencers with the goal of flooding social media with sponsored content. This time, it was a major AI company.Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI’s “first ever brand trip,” which appears to have taken place outside of New York City at a nature-filled retreat (for those curious, it looks to be the Instagram-bait Wildflower Farms). The trip was marketed as “Summer Club,” and influencers posted photos and videos from their cabins, showing off branded merch and monogrammed pajamas and talking vaguely about the scheduled programming. Many of the content creators appear to be in the career and business niches, posting about workplace culture or about being CEOs. Grace McCarrick, who has 145,000 followers on TikTok, vlogged from her suite as she ran a bath at night. Another influencer, Nat Lucy (57,000 followers), filmed herself spotting a deer outside of her cabin. All hell broke loose.“People will literally sell their soul and their planet down the river for a nice free hotel room,” one commenter on TikTok wrote under McCarrick’s video. “Wow! Beautiful greenery! They should put a data center there!” reads a comment on Lucy’s post. Most of the videos got relatively little traction: McCarrick’s video has just under 300 likes, and Lucy’s video has fewer than 15,000 views. It’s measly engagement compared to what other splashy brand trips can command — but videos reacting to the trip have made it something of a scandal (a pair of clips alone has over half a million combined views).Many of the comments on the influencers’ videos cite the environmental effects of the AI boom, the contentious buildout of data centers across the US, and the potential for job replacement or job loss as a result of companies integrating AI in the workplace. Some also questioned why so many of the content creators who went on the trip appeared to be young women, as if OpenAI was targeting a specific demographic via media they were more connected to (though based on photos and videos posted to social media, there were men on the trip, too). According to Pew, even as the AI usage gap between men and women has all but disappeared, women tend to view AI more negatively and are twice as likely to say AI will negatively impact them personally. Some audiences wondered whether female influencers were essentially being used to launder the reputation of an industry under scrutiny.McCarrick, who describes herself as a creator who talks about “soft skills we need at work to millio