Over the weekend, OpenAI faced online backlash after bringing a group of creators to a luxury retreat in New York’s Hudson Valley dubbed “OpenAI Summer Camp,” held at Wildflower Farms. Between the luxury private cabins, the beekeeping, and the farm-to-table dinners, the scenery was picture-perfect.
But the response to it was not.
The split showed up almost immediately, and it broke cleanly along one line: people who saw the trip as OpenAI meeting its community where it is, and people who saw it as tone-deaf, given AI’s environmental and economic costs.
On one side, Instagram creator @nat.lucyy shared a photodump on Instagram captioned: “got to go to summer camp with @openai @chatgpt 🤍🧺🍃 officially letting my ai assistant do the work so I can enjoy more of all this goodness.” On the other hand, X users joked OpenAI was “sending them to nature before they turn it into a data center,” that the retreat sounded like a “camp where the friendship bracelets are API keys.”
Attendee Grace McCarrick, a creator focused on corporate soft-skills, pushed back directly on the backlash in a LinkedIn post, writing she “didn’t for one second consider it could be controversial.” She argued her critics were hypocritical given their own smartphone and platform use.
The strategic critique came from outside the trip, too. Creator economy commentator Andrew Yeung called it a “comms disaster,” arguing OpenAI had alienated the very audience it needs to win over by inviting a small group on what he estimated was a $10,000-a-head retreat rather than investing in an event that gave the broader public access to AI education. In other words, the backlash wasn’t just about AI skepticism. It was also about whether the traditional influencer trip still works when the brand is an AI company.
Even that debate about execution was really a symptom of something bigger. OpenAI, for its part, framed the event as practical. According to OpenAI, the retreat was designed to give creators hands-on experience with the company’s newly launched ChatGPT Work tools, calling this kind of creator collaboration standard practice across the tech industry.
But that explanation landed on an audience already split over what “normal” looks like when it comes to AI, at a moment when OpenAI is reportedly close to finalizing a $500 billion Ohio data center deal and New York just enacted a one-year moratorium on certain AI data center construction. For a growing share of the population, every glossy AI campaign now gets read through the lens of energy use, copyright battles, labor concerns, and the technology’s broader societal impact.
None of that made the backlash inevitable. What it did make clear is that AI has entered a different phase of public life. Companies are no longer just trying to convince people to use these tools; they’re asking creators to build communities around them, the same way a beauty brand or sneaker label might. The reaction to OpenAI’s retreat suggests audiences haven’t reached a consensus on whether AI should be marketed in the same way a beauty brand like Tarte would.
Farm-to-table dinners and painting classes were meant to make ChatGPT feel approachable. Instead, they revealed something else: some people are proud to support AI in public. Other people don’t think anyone should be.