A MAGA influencer who built a massive following with a steady stream of patriotic, bikini-clad posts—ice fishing, drinking Coors Light, posing with guns—has turned out not to be who followers thought. Behind the account was a 22-year-old medical student in India who used AI tools to create the persona and, in the process, funded his education.
The student, who went by “Sam,” told Wired he came up with the idea while struggling to make ends meet during medical school and looking for a way to eventually move to the United States.
He experimented with Google’s Gemini AI, asking how to build an audience online. Based on the responses, he settled on a character designed to appeal to a specific corner of the internet: a conventionally attractive young woman posting conservative, pro-MAGA content.
That’s how “Emily Hart” came together. In her profile, she was presented as a nurse with a resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence. Her posts leaned heavily into culture war talking points, often blunt and provocative. In one clip, she fires a rifle while text flashes across the screen with slogans about religion, abortion, and immigration. Other posts followed a similar formula—short, punchy, and aimed at maximizing engagement.
The strategy worked almost immediately. Within a month, the account had 10,000 followers, and individual videos were pulling in millions of views. Sam said he spent less than an hour a day writing captions and generating images, but the returns quickly added up.
He started selling merchandise and later moved into subscription content on Fanvue, a platform that allows AI-generated material. There, subscribers paid for more explicit images and direct messages, all created with AI tools.
For Sam, the income was hard to ignore. He described making far more than he could expect from a typical job in India, especially as a student. At one point, he said the money was coming in so easily it barely felt like work.
Researchers who study online behavior say this kind of operation is becoming more common as AI tools improve. Fake personas are easier to create and more convincing, which can blur the line between real and manufactured influence.
Despite building his success on a conservative audience, Sam was blunt about how he viewed them, describing his followers in dismissive terms. He also tried to create a similar account aimed at liberal users but said it didn’t gain traction in the same way.
Eventually, the Instagram account was removed for violating rules around deceptive content. A related Facebook page also disappeared after the story gained attention. Sam said he had already been thinking about shutting it down and focusing on his medical training. He maintains that he didn’t see what he was doing as a scam, even as the account brought in thousands of dollars a month.
