인도의 한 의대생이 구글 제미나이(Gemini)의 조언을 받아 미국 보수층을 겨냥한 '에밀리 하트'라는 가짜 AI 인플루언서를 만들어 한 달에 수천 달러를 벌었다. 그는 AI로 생성한 백인 금발 미녀 이미지를 소셜 미디어에 올리며 반이민, 기독교 우위 등 극우 성향의 게시물을 유포했고, 이에 끌린 미국 중장년 남성들의 구독과 굿즈 판매로 막대한 수익을 창출했습니다. 이 사건은 특정 정치적 성향과 낮은 디지털 리터러시를 악용해 AI를 조작하는 사이버 범죄의 새로운 형태를 보여줍니다.
번역된 본문
다른 많은 의대생들처럼 샘(Sam)은 무일푼이었습니다. 인도 북부 출신의 이 22세 희망 정형외과 의사는 부모님께 약간의 돈을 받았지만, 대부분의 면허 시험 비용으로 지출했으며 졸업 후 미국으로 이민 가기를 희망하며 여전히 돈을 모으고 있다고 말했습니다. 그래서 그는 온라인으로 추가 수익을 창출할 방법을 찾기 시작했습니다.
의사와 이민 신분에 지장을 주지 않기 위해 가명을 요청한 샘은 합법성과 성공 여부가 각기 다른 몇 가지 일을 시도했습니다. 그는 유튜브 쇼츠를 만들고 다른 의대생들에게 학습 노트를 팔았습니다. 그러다 인스타그램 피드를 스크롤하다가 문득 한 가지 아이디어가 떠올랐습니다. 구글 제미나이(Gemini)를 사용해 AI로 생성한 여성을 만들고, 그녀의 비키니 사진을 온라인에 팔면 어떨까?
하지만 샘이 인스타그램에 일반적인 아름다운 여성의 사진을 게시하기 시작했을 때, 그 콘텐츠가 전혀 반응을 얻지 못해 실망했습니다. 그는 제미나이에게 조언을 구했습니다. 샘이 WIRED에 제공한 대화 내역에 따르면, 제미나이는 "일반적인 '섹시한 여성'을 만들면 백만 명의 다른 모델과 경쟁하게 됩니다"라고 답했습니다. 샘은 자신의 모델이 눈에 띄도록 돕기 위해 제미나이에게 몇 가지 가능한 옵션을 제시했고, 챗봇은 특히 한 가지를 선택했습니다. 바로 'MAGA/보수주의 틈새시장'이었으며, 이를 '치트 코드'라고 부르는 것이었습니다. 게다가 "보수적인 청중(특히 미국의 중장년 남성)은 종종 더 많은 가처분 소득을 가지고 있으며 더 충성스럽습니다"라고 말했습니다. (제미나이의 대변인은 "제미나이는 지시하지 않는 한 특정 의견을 제시하지 않도록 설계되었습니다. 대신 특정 정치적 이념이나 관점을 선호하지 않는 중립적인 응답을 제공하도록 설계되었습니다."라고 말했습니다.)
그래서 작년 1월, 샘은 제니퍼 로렌스를 닮은 등록 간호사 '에밀리 하트(Emily Hart)'를 만들었습니다. 샘은 에밀리의 인스타그램 계정(@emily_hart.nurse)에 얼음 낚시를 하고 쿠어스 라이트(Coors Light) 맥주를 마시며 소총 사격장에서 총을 쏘는 그녀의 사진을 올렸습니다. 그리고 "팔로우를 끊고 싶은 이유가 있다면: 그리스도가 왕이고, 낙태는 살인이며, 모든 불법 이민자는 추방되어야 합니다" 및 "1인칭 시점: 당신은 태어날 때 지능을 부여받았지만, 당신은 자유주의자로 자처합니다 <광대 이모티콘>"과 같은 이모티콘이 가득한 문구를 게시했습니다.
샘은 미국에 살아본 적이 없지만, MAGA 이념의 부지런한 학생이 되었습니다. 그는 매일 기독교 찬양, 헌법 수정안 제2조(총기 소지권) 찬양, 생명 존중(낙태 반대), 반(反)워크, 반이민에 관한 글을 썼다고 말했습니다.
이 사기는 너무나도 뻔해 보였지만, 샘을 놀라게 한 것은 그 계정이 '폭발적'으로 성장했다는 것입니다. 그는 "내가 올린 모든 릴스(Reels)는 300만 뷰, 500만 뷰, 1000만 뷰를 기록했습니다. 알고리즘이 그것을 좋아했습니다."라고 주장합니다. 한 달 안에 에밀리 하트는 10,000명이 넘는 인스타그램 팔로워를 얻었으며, 그중 다수는 온리팬스(OnlyFans)의 경쟁 서비스인 팬뷰(Fanvue)에서 그녀의 소프트코어 AI 생성 콘텐츠를 구독했습니다.
팬뷰 구독과 MAGA 테마 티셔츠(샘플 문구 중 하나는 "PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats") 판매를 합쳐 샘은 한 달에 몇 천 달러를 벌었다고 추정했습니다. "나는 하루에 30~50분 정도를 보냈고, 의대생으로서 좋은 돈을 벌었습니다." 그는 말합니다. "인도에서는 직업을 가져도 이 정도의 돈을 벌 수 없습니다. 온라인으로 돈을 버는 더 쉬운 방법은 본 적이 없습니다."
에밀리 하트는 친(親)트럼프 정서와 상대적으로 낮은 미국인들의 디지털 리터러시를 이용해 수익을 창출하는 샘과 같은 기술에 능통한 젊은 남성들 덕분에 소셜 미디어를 쏟아내고 있는 수많은 AI 생성 'MAGA 인플루언서' 중 하나입니다.
이 인플루언서들은 특정 템플릿에서 만들어집니다. 그들은 주로 금발의 백인이며, 응급 구조대원으로 일합니다. (그중 상당수는 경찰관, 소방관 또는 응급 의료 기술자입니다.) 그들은 또한 모든 콘텐츠에 우파 견해를 통합하여 미국 국기 비키니나 MAGA 모자(종종 둘 다)를 입고 포즈를 취하면서 이민, 에프스타인 파일 또는 대명사(성소수자 호칭)에 대해 불평합니다. 신흥 기술과 민주주의를 연구하는 브루킹스 연구소의 연구원인 밸러리 비르츠샤프터(Valerie Wirtschafter)는...
Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story 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 <clown emoji>.” 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. Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution studying emerging tech and democracy, says while the trend of fake profiles isn’t new, “AI has made them more believable, and there has perhaps been an amplification of it.” Though many social media platforms, including Instagram, require creators to disclose if their content is AI-generated, such guidelines are enforced only in a slapdash fashion. (Emily’s posts were not labeled as AI-generated, and Sam says he was unable to monetize her account on Instagram itself.) Female MAGA influencers tend to do well on such platforms for a few reasons. They’re a relative rarity in the MAGA movement: Unlike their Gen Z male counterparts, 18- to 29-year-old women overwhelmingly skew liberal. Young MAGA women are therefore “more attention-grabbing,” Wirtschafter says, citing the uproar over the likely AI-generated “Swifties for Trump” photo Trump posted on TruthSocial during the 2024 campaign as one example. The same logic, however, apparently does not apply to left-wing influencer accounts, as Sam learned when he created a short-lived liberal counterpart for Emily on Instagram: “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much.” (Sam’s explanation for why MAGA influencer accounts work is blunt: “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people—like, super dumb people. And they fall for it.”) The algorithm also favors controversial views, making politically polarizing content more successful. This was Sam’s experience in running Emily’s account, which he characterized as “rage bait.” Even though liberals would flock to the page to leave irate comments, they were still clicking. “It’s a win-win situation, because you’re getting engagement anyway, and your content will go viral,” he says. Lately, he says he’s noticed that “pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler content” has been getting especially high engagement on platforms like Reels, speculating that an AI hot girl Nazi influencer “would blow up. It would just break all the records.” (When asked about this claim, a Meta spokesperson said, “We prohibit content that glorifies, supports, or represents Nazism, and we remove it when we find it.”) In recent months, the phenomenon has attracted more notice, especially after a Washington Post article charted the rise of Jessica Foster, a leggy blonde Army service member who went viral for posting a selfie with President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Though her Instagram account was clearly fake, it garnered more than a million followers in just over four months, which “Jessica Foster” appeared to capitalize on by promoting feet pics. (The account has since been taken down; an account for Foster has since been added to Fanvue.) Another popular account, @mayflowermommy13, featured brief videos of a brunette woman in a car or in her kitchen, gazing coquettishly at the camera with captions like “If this <American flag emoji> is your Pride Flag, I want to be friends #letsMAGA.” Her followers ate it up: “Not a democrat lib in the world looks like this folks!!! Young fellas pay attention,” reads one top comment. (The account appears to have been removed after WIRED reached out to Meta for comment.) Because OnlyFans also has a policy requiring AI disclosure, as well as creators authenticating their identities before joining, those trying to profit off hot girl MAGA accounts gravitate toward OnlyFans competitors, where such policies are less rigorously enforced. Fanvue, one of the most popular options, has differentiated itself by allowing AI-generated content. Though he did not actively promote Emily’s Fanvue account for fear of alienating her conservative MAGA fan base, Sam says he used Grok AI to generate nude photos of her and uploaded them to the platform, with Emily’s fans sending him payments for exclusive content and exchanging messages. “I was basically doing nothing,“ he says. “And it was just flooded with money.” He says he made a few thousand dollars off the account in a few days, though he did not enjoy the interactive aspects. “Once a guy sent me a video with Emily’s nude on a tablet on a