A plumber puts an ad in the paper / Google for their services in your area. This makes you aware of their services. This is marketing their services to you. By seeing the ad, are you manipulated into using their services?
Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.
Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
Disclaimer: I work at OpenAI. Lots of people! I get a lot of value out of these already.
If it helps, here's an example: Our team shares wonderful customer demos in Slack. In the past, these would get lost in Slack unless someone took the time to manually create the documentation and log it in Notion.
That meant no one really logged them and the example of good work was lost.
Now, I tag workspace agent in the slack thread, it reads the thread, puts it into the right shape, and logs it (with considerably high fidelity). Saves us time, does the job no one wanted to do, and helps new hires+tenured folks like me learn from our colleagues.
(I used to use Codex to do the same thing by sharing the slack link, but now can skip that step).
That’s a very dismissive point of view to the seriousness of the situation. He had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his home in the immediate aftermath of an article that painted him in a negative light. The two may not be connected but seem to be.