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A comely MAGA influencer who racked up millions of followers with patriotic content of her posing in a bikini while ice fishing, drinking Coors Light and shooting guns has been unmasked โ as an Indian man who put himself through med school on the proceeds of his trickery.
โSam,โ a 22-year-old orthopedic surgeon in training, told Wired that he got the idea to sell AI-generated images of a young woman in a bikini while scrounging for money in school โ and trying to save up enough to emigrate to the US after graduation.
He turned to Googleโs Gemini AI for advice and decided to create a โhot girlโ crafted specifically for the โMAGA/conservative niche,โ after the software told him that โthe conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal,โ according to Wired.
And thatโs how Emily Hart was born.
According to her profile, she was a registered nurse with Jennifer Lawrence looks who offered red-meat posts to lonely conservative men online.
One post showed her firing a rifle with the caption: โIf you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported,โ and โPOV: You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as liberal.โ
Sam told the magazine, โEvery day Iโd write something pro-Christian, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke, and anti-immigration.โ
The account โblew up,โ and Emily Hart had 10,000 followers within a month.
Every reel he posted garnered millions of views and earned him more followers.
He then cashed in on the AI modelโs appeal โ selling MAGA-themed T-shirts and creating an account on the OnlyFans competitor Fanvue, where paid subscribers could access lewd AI-generated content.
Fanvue has differentiated itself from OnlyFans by allowing AI-generated content on its platform, the outlet said.
The move made him a mint โ and Sam was soon raking in thousands of dollars a month.
โI was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,โ he recalled.
โIn India, even in professional jobs, you canโt make this amount of money. I havenโt seen any easier way to make money online.โ
Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution studying emerging tech and democracy, told the outlet that โAI has made them [fake profiles] more believable, and there has perhaps been an amplification of it.โ
The tech expert added that young MAGA women are โmore attention-grabbingโ since most women ages 18 to 29 skew liberal.
Despite MAGA fans making him rich, he still looks down on them, calling them โsuper-dumb.โ
He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but โDemocrats know that itโs AI slop, so they donโt engage as much,โ he said.
โThe MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people โ like, super-dumb people. And they fall for it,โ Sam said.
Sam used Grok AI to generate nude photos of Hart and uploaded them to Fanvue, where fans sent him money for exclusive content and messages.
โI was basically doing nothing,โ he said. โAnd it was just flooded with money.โ
Hartโs profile on Instagram โ which requires creators to disclose whether their content is AI-generated โwas taken down by the platform in February for โfraudulentโ activity, the outlet said.
A Facebook account that Wired said remained online has been taken down since the article was published about Samโs scheme.
The medical student added that he would have stopped posting content of Hart anyway.
โI donโt feel like I was scamming people,โ Sam said.
Instead, heโs hoping to focus on his studies in medical school.
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