A bunch of the fashion and culture adjacent accounts that I follow have been clowning OpenAI this past week for their newest merch drop. This isn't OpenAI's first foray into doing merch. They started by giving out free merch to employees, and then as they've gained this tech bro cult following, they've release some items from their internal off sites. And this past week they got a wave of fashion press for their streetwear inspired new collection. They sell under the store Open AI Supply Co., and while some of it is selling out, I wanna talk about why OpenAI putting out merch that looks like this specifically is so ironic and so insincere, given what we know about them and what they say about who they are and what they do. I also wanna talk about why it's doing the complete opposite of selling me on using AI more. I don't wanna spend too long on any of the individual items because if you actually look at it, it still is ugly corporate tech gear. But the thing that caught my eye, and that seemed to have caught a lot of other people's eyes, is the promotional photoshoot that they did for the merch, which screams Aimé Leon Dore 2021 to me. I know (edit: HighSnobiety!!) said 2022, but my lived experience says 2021. And that their design director said that the collection was inspired by Virgil Abloh. Let's start with what OpenAI says that it's for, in their own words, the whole point is to drive the cost of intelligence to near zero and make intelligence basically infinite. Sam Alman has said they want a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water that you pay them for to use on a meter-like basis. He points to coding. Some of the tasks that used to take a couple of days can now be done in a few minutes. But the whole pitch of their technology is more output, more speed, less cost, and fewer humans required. Let's contrast that with a luxury good or any quality piece of fashion. A quality fashion item is worth something precisely because it is none of those things. It's the opposite of infinite and cheap. It's fewer units, slower production, higher cost, and skilled humans making it. So, yes, OpenAI can do a limited drop of tees. But their entire pitch is that their tech should enable me to generate near infinite iterations of the design of "research" on a quarter zip in 30 seconds or less. So I have a much harder time believing that there's any scarcity (or value) to what they're churning out. In the same way, let's talk about the Aimé Leon Dore of it all. ALD, if you don't know, is the downtown New York label that defined a lot of menswear and preppy streetwear in the late 2010s and the early 2020s. It's not heritage luxury like Hermes or Louis Vuitton, but it's definitely upscale. They have an investment from LVMH, and it's a symbol of taste for a certain higher socioeconomic, stylish, coastal elite man. The reason that that look of wearing ALD means anything is because the brand earned that status. ALS has its provenance. Teddy Santis, who's the founder, was raised in Queens by Greek immigrant parents, and he grew up in his family's leather good shop. That's the origin that his brand is built on. He's been the creative director of New Balance's made in USA line. He owns A.L.D. Stores and cafes that have become the fabric of downtown New York. When he does a shoot, sometimes the people in the lookbooks or the marketing campaigns are people from his own network or their cultural figures whose own history makes it cool that they're wearing the thing. Even before Teddy and ALD, streetwear has provenance itself, There's Southern California surf and skate culture. There's New York hip hop and graffiti art. There's Japanese designers. All of the streetwear that draws someone in to actually wear it has been created by a designer with lived experience. OpenAI has the color palette, the clothing tags, the set design, the styling. While being an AI research nonprofit, sorry for profit, who routinely lean on fair use in court. AI companies argue that they shouldn't have to license or pay for the world's writing, art, history or design in order to train on it. That they can take it to create intelligence. like a utility without compensating whoever made it. And have a model reproduce it infinitely without attribution. On paper to them, in the way that they move, culture is not worth paying for or attributing. But in these collections, they want to lean on what makes culture interesting again for free. I guess if you think about it, that does kinda check out for them. You see the same contradiction in their advertising. OpenAI's first big ChatGPT brand campaign was a set of films directed by Miles Jay. Miles Jay has directed music videos for Jay Z, Leon Bridges, and the campaigns were shot on 35 millimeter film by a cinematographer who's worked with Luca Guadignino on "Bones And All". Their product is telling you that to keep up in the world, you should think less and be less skilled at your craft. And to sell you on that, they hired some of the most skilled, most creative people they could find and they shot their campaigns on film. It's clear to me that OpenAI and other AI companies know that craft and culture and human made things are exactly what create the cachet that create communities that people want to belong to and are exactly what makes someone want to believe in a brand at all. But that's not what their technology ask you to do. So which is it? The last thing that stands out to me is just the audacity of asking people who don't work for your company to rep your brand. Wearing a brand, whether luxury Hermes or open AI merch is a signal to the world about who you are. As far as tech companies go, OpenAI is trying to stand where Apple stands. People go to Apple Park visitor centre and they buy the merch that Apple sells and they wear it. And the reason that that means something is because I think, in large part, of who Steve Jobs was and what he meant to people. He crossed Liberal arts with technology. He was a fierce advocate for the arts and for artists, and he made Apple into a symbol of defying expectations in making products that people loved and wanted. There's a storied history behind Apple that was built over decades of winning over people's love and trust. This merch drop and asking people to rep the open AI brand reads to me like OpenAI wants the same cultural position without having done any of the work to earn people's trust or to leave a good, inspiring Mark on the world. Now listen, if you work at OpenAI, wear the merch. It's a high skill, extremely high paying job, and if you can get hired there, you can get hired basically anywhere. So being employed there is already a choice that signals something about you, whether you want to interpret that as your values or your skill set. Whether they're wearing the merch or not, the person I'm actually very curious about is The regular person unemployed by open AI choosing to put on open AI merch. Unlike what the apple brand might signal to the world, the openAI brand right now signals the anxiety about AI taking jobs, the board coup chaos, a pile of lawsuits, leadership a lot of people don't trust, and a CEO who keeps handing horribly powerful technology to our convicted felon president. So when you put that shirt on, what are you saying about yourself? I'm so curious. Because if you are a regular person not employed by open AI, walking down the street in their shirt, it's just a huge win for them. And maybe you want that. But sentiment about AI and open AI is low enough that you will become a local walking advertisement for someone in your community to come up to you and start arguing with you about AI. The best case for open AI is that they're hoping your own cultural cachet in your community, if you have any, is enough to nudge the people around you to start feeling differently about their technology. You're being used as a pawn. And in the end, all of those attempts to relate to humans, the merch and the ads do the opposite for me personally. They make me want their tech less because to make themselves a more desirable brand. They are not reaching for their technology at all. They're reaching for design references, human directors, 35 millimeter film, and downtown New York. Street style. So thanks to OpenAI, I'm now far more sold on leaning harder into real taste, real skill and real art. Because they're doing it too.
