Friends, today's AI circus could be Chapter 1 of the textbook "Tech PR Fails: A Complete Anthology."

Here's what went down: OpenAI recently threw a "creator summer camp" in New York's Hudson Valley, at a luxury resort where weekend rates run over $2,000 a night — roughly ¥13,000 RMB. The guests weren't engineers or researchers. They were Instagram and TikTok influencers — lifestyle creators, career gurus, personal growth coaches.

The activities? Farm therapy, honey harvesting, painting, pastoral bliss. A long banquet table with a glowing OpenAI logo at the end, Hudson Valley breezes, everyone harvesting honey and chatting about their ChatGPT Work experiences, posting Instagram Stories — the perfect brand event.

The Posts Went Up, and the Comments Section Exploded

What OpenAI expected: influencers post pretty pictures, fans see "wow OpenAI is so classy," ChatGPT Work gets a nice viral bump, premium brand image secured.

What happened? The comments were uniformly brutal.

"Talking about AGI benefiting all humanity while flying influencers to $2,000/night hotels to harvest honey? The hypocrisy is stunning."

"Why don't you go live in a data center? Finished that environmental impact report for the $500B Ohio data center project yet?"

"The world is on fire — this isn't the moment to show off luxury resorts."

The most stinging comment: "Who even are these people? I've been building on your API for three years and never got invited; someone on TikTok teaching people to write resumes with AI gets a honey-harvesting retreat?"

Business Insider piled on, sending OpenAI three questions: Were creators paid? Who covered travel and lodging? Were creators required to post? OpenAI didn't directly answer a single one. According to reports, several attending influencers have quietly deleted their posts about the event — they came for a classy brand trip and got ratioed into oblivion. Not worth it.

Anthropic and Microsoft Did It Too — Why Only OpenAI Got Roasted

You might be thinking: tech companies hosting creator events is normal. Anthropic threw creator dinners for Claude; Microsoft flew influencers to the Super Bowl for Copilot. Why did only OpenAI faceplant?

Because the gap between branding and behavior was a chasm. What's OpenAI's official narrative? "We're a mission-driven company, our goal is ensuring AGI benefits all humanity, we started as a nonprofit (even if we aren't one anymore), we're doing world-saving important work." And then you turn around and drop millions flying lifestyle influencers to a luxury farm to harvest honey?

It's like the founder posting every day on WeChat Moments about "changing the world," and then you run into him popping champagne by a five-star hotel pool — you don't think he's evil, but you definitely think: bro, is your persona cracking a little?

And the timing was terrible. OpenAI was just getting dragged over Ohio data center environmental concerns, Astra's math proof launch was still talking about "AI pushing humanity's knowledge frontier," and days later this drops. Couldn't you have waited a month?

A Few Notes for AI PR Teams

A few humble suggestions for all AI company PR teams out there.

One: before throwing an event, remember what your company persona is. Are you a "change the world" mission-driven company, or a regular software shop selling tools? If the former, keeping a low profile doesn't hurt. If the latter, fly as many influencers as you want — nobody cares.

Two: influencer marketing isn't a silver bullet. Promoting a B2B product with consumer-facing influencers is questionable at best; add the luxury optics, and you mainly manage to offend your actual core users (developers, enterprise customers).

Three: whose idea was honey harvesting, seriously?

That's enough ranting for today. More tomorrow.