There's a sucker born every minute, as the saying goes, and the AI revolution seems to have increased that rate exponentially—especially where MAGA is concerned.
A man in India recently shared with Wired that he's made so much money scamming MAGA devotees using AI that he now has enough to go to medical school.
How'd he do it? He created a fake AI MAGA influencer to tell Donald Trump's "super dumb" fans exactly what they want to hear.
Oh, and before any lurking MAGA types go there: He tried doing it with a fake liberal influencer too but it didn't work because Democrats could tell it was a scam. LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
Now, yes, this is all highly unethical or whatever, but credit where it's due: This guy's scam is kind of a stroke of genius.
Sam, as he's called in Wired's profile, is an aspiring orthopedic surgeon with the same problem most students have: He was flat broke, after what little money his parents had was eaten up by licensing exams.
He turned to some legitimate means to make money at first, but with the release of Google's absolutely terrifying AI tool Nana Banana Pro, which makes photos and videos so realistic it should quite literally be illegal, he got a burst of inspiration.
He started creating hot AI girls to post on Instagram, but it didn't go anywhere. But Google's Gemini AI tool told him if he made the hot girls specifically MAGA hot girls, he'd hit a goldmine.
That's when Emily Hart, a blond, often bikini-clad, Trump-worshipping hot girl was born—and soon, so was a mountain of cash.
Google's Gemini tools nailed the MAGA influencer content so perfectly that, combined with the scandals of recent years in which several real MAGA influencers have been revealed to be on Russia's payroll, it should really make all of us stop to question whether the MAGA movement was ever as "real" as we all assumed in the first place.
Sam posted memes showing Emily Hart drinking a beer with braindead quotes like:
"Of course Democrats protest against ICE... Cuz they are deporting half of their voters."
@CultureCrave/X
Never mind that the meme shows Emily casually drinking a beer WHILE FLOATING IN A FROZEN LAKE THAT WOULD KILL HER WITHIN MINUTES.
It mocks Dems and that's all your average MAGA needs to hear!
And speaking of Dems, Sam was very candid about what went down when he tried to create a liberal version of Emily to try to make money off of liberals' attention.
He told Wired:
“Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much..."
"...The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people—like, super dumb people. And they fall for it.”
So how lucrative was it? In a word: Very. Sam told Wired he was pulling down thousands of dollars a month for not even an hour's work each day, especially once he start creating nudes of Emily.
“I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student."
"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.”
And he's not the only one. Wired reported that there are scores of scammers just like Sam who have flooded the internet with fake MAGA influencers and who are raking in major money because of MAGA's gullibility.
On social media, people couldn't help but laugh about how easy it was for the Indian student to grift MAGA devotees.
Well, Donald Trump did say he "loves the uneducated"! And now we definitively know why.
