Emma Orhun was alone in her apartment when a flood of harsh comments rolled in.
“The first hour was the scariest,” she told Business Insider. “People are saying mean things, and then, I have no one to turn to and be like, ‘Are they right? Are they not? Am I crazy?'”
Orhun, an Ottawa-based social media influencer and former Shopify design technologist, said she was “micro-canceled” for posting a promotion for Anthropic. She received another round of backlash after talking about that experience on “The Internet is Dead” podcast.
She’s not alone. Influencers — including those who make money creating promotional content for their followers — have been getting virtual rotten tomatoes flung in their direction when they pair up with AI labs.
In late July, for example, OpenAI hosted a luxury retreat in upstate New York for roughly a dozen social media personalities. The weekend event included workshops on AI use cases and a beekeeping seminar. When the influencers posted pictures of their OpenAI-branded jars of honey and videos detailing their weekend learnings, the comment sections swarmed with angry followers calling the event everything from “dystopian” to “morally bankrupt.”
Orhun didn’t attend that event, but her paid promotion with Anthropic received a similar response. Some longtime followers told her AI was “bad for the earth” or said they would unfollow.
“I was nervous that everything that they said was right,” she told Business Insider.
The comments made her doubt herself, but they didn’t change her mind. “When you yell at people about it and say, ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ and ‘you’re a terrible person,’ that is no way to get on the same page about anything,” she said.
On the podcast, Orhun argued that women online are often expected to act as a kind of moral compass — and suggested that men could use the same AI tools without attracting the same scrutiny.
After the clip drew its own criticism, Orhun said she would now qualify that argument. She pointed to male creators who have also faced backlash for AI promotions and said the reaction to her Claude ad “might not be a gender thing.”
She still believes the broader expectation is uneven, though. Women online, she told Business Insider, are more often expected to take the ethically correct position on everything from politics to technology.
Orhun said she now worries that negative comments are putting users in what amounts to an AI closet. Continued backlash could make people less candid about their AI use, she argued.
“I know a lot of people who use the tools,” she said, but “they just won’t talk about it.”
In her own creations, Orhun draws a line between using AI to help with technical work and using generative AI to produce artwork. She uses tools like Claude to code and work through unfamiliar technical problems, but said she won’t use AI to generate her art.
“I draw every single day,” she said. “I love art, human-made art so much.”
