OpenAI president Greg Brockman commented on X with a tweet calling the story “fake news” and OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay McCallum Rémy wrote “this is completely false”.
It was remarkably convenient to see that the account that “found” the ad was brand new. The “wineheda” Reddit account behind the original post has now been deleted, but a search of the Internet Archive revealed that just a year ago the person behind it was trying to expand his business as an accountant in Santa Monica—it would be quite a career move to suddenly be someone working on ads for OpenAI and Jony Ive in time for Super Bowl LX.
Whoever was behind this hoax had been working on it for some time and proceeded to spread their story on multiple fronts. Max Weinbach tweeted screenshots of an email he received a week ago suggesting a tweet promoting the OpenAI hardware trailer with Alexander Skarsgård, which apparently came with an actual payment of $1,146.12. AND Adage reporter Gillian Follett tweeted today about a “fake headline” attributed to her, falsely portraying a story about OpenAI changing its Super Bowl ad, while OpenAI’s director of marketing Kate Rouch mentioned “a whole fake website” trying to back up the same thing.