OpenAI's PR Mess Is Partly Self-Inflicted, and the People Saying So Work in the Industry

A post on Bluesky this week put it with unusual directness: "The Big AI industry writ large did very much bring this PR clusterfuck upon themselves." It got 256 likes, which in Bluesky's comparatively smaller ecosystem represents genuine traction. What made it notable wasn't the criticism — {{entity:openai|OpenAI}} draws criticism constantly — but the framing. The author wasn't an outside observer venting. The phrasing "writ large" signals familiarity with how the industry talks about itself. This was someone inside the tent, or close enough to it, saying the damage is deserved. That framing keeps reappearing in the conversations clustered around OpenAI right now. A separate Bluesky post, also negative but with a different register — sardonic rather than analytical — noted that "OpenAI being the one that dies would be funny lol." The humor is telling. You don't joke about a company's death unless you've stopped believing the company is indispensable. A few months ago, that kind of post would have read as naive contrarianism. Today it reads as a live possibility some people are entertaining with genuine satisfaction. As {{story:sam-altman-handed-off-safety-stuff-nobody-df2e|Sam Altman has delegated more of the company's safety posture}}, the trust deficit that was already accumulating has started to feel structural rather than episodic. The {{beat:ai-job-displacement|job displacement}} thread running parallel to all of this adds a different texture. A post from X flagged a translator on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 who claims he was fired and replaced with AI — "I want you to know that the growing use of AI greatly affects people in the games industry and many others" — and it got nearly 200 engagements on a platform where most posts disappear instantly. That story already received its own treatment here, {{story:games-industry-translator-got-fired-replaced-ai-ad8f|examining what the reaction reveals about where the real business story sits}}. But the fact that it keeps circulating, keeps getting reshared alongside the OpenAI reputation posts, suggests these threads are merging in people's minds. The company that dominates the industry conversation is also the company whose technology is taking translators' jobs. The association isn't accidental. What's crystallizing — and this is the thing worth watching — is that the defense of OpenAI has largely gone quiet. News coverage remains positive in aggregate, full of user-count milestones and enterprise benchmarks. But the places where people actually argue, Bluesky in particular, have shifted from debating OpenAI's choices to assuming its culpability. That's a different kind of problem than bad press. Bad press can be managed. When the informed, adjacent audience stops arguing and starts shrugging, the reputational math changes in ways that don't show up in any growth metric until they do.