Like many medical school students, Sam was broke.
The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but he says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and he’s still saving up to hopefully emigrate to the US after graduation. So he started searching for ways to make additional money online.
Sam, who requested a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, tried a few things, with varying degrees of legitimacy and success. He made YouTube shorts and sold study notes to other med students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through his Instagram feed that he landed on an idea: Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online?
But when Sam started posting generic photos of a beautiful, scantily clad woman on Instagram, he was dismayed to find that none of the content was hitting. He turned to Gemini for advice. “If you create a generic ‘hot girl,’ you’re competing with a million other models,” it said, according to a transcript Sam provided to WIRED.
Sam says he presented Gemini with a few possible options to help his model stand out, and the chatbot selected one in particular: the “MAGA/conservative niche,” referring to it as a “cheat code.” Plus, it said, “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal.” (A representative for Gemini said, “Gemini is designed not to give a particular opinion unless you tell it to. Instead, it is designed to offer neutral responses that don’t favor any political ideology or viewpoint.”)
So last January, Sam created Emily Hart, a registered nurse and Jennifer Lawrence look-alike. On an Instagram account for Emily, @emily_hart.nurse, Sam posted photos of her ice fishing, drinking Coors Light, and shooting off a few rounds at the rifle range, with emoji-laden captions like “If you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported,” and “POV: You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as liberal
Though Sam has never lived in the United States, he became an assiduous student of MAGA ideology. “Every day I’d write something pro-Christian, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke, and anti-immigration,” he tells me.
The grift seemed almost too obvious, but to Sam’s astonishment, he says the account “blew up.”
“Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved it.” he claims. Within a month, Emily Hart had more than 10,000 Instagram followers, many of whom also subscribed to her softcore AI-generated content on the OnlyFans competitor Fanvue. And between Fanvue subscriptions and selling MAGA-themed T-shirts (one sample message reads ”PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats”), Sam estimates he was making a few thousand dollars a month.
“I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he says. “In India, even in professional jobs, you can’t make this amount of money. I haven’t seen any easier way to make money online.”
Emily Hart is one of a slew of AI-generated hot girl MAGA influencers inundating social media, thanks to technologically savvy young men like Sam capitalizing both on pro-Trump sentiment and Americans’ relative lack of digital literacy.
The influencers are created from a specific template: they tend to be white and blonde, with jobs as emergency responders. (A lot of them are cops, firefighters, or EMTs.) They also incorporate right-wing views into all of their content, railing about immigration or the Epstein files or pronouns while posing in American flag bikinis or MAGA hats—often both.