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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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"?
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.
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.
