Emily Hart, a viral MAGA influencer who amassed a massive conservative following in the United States, has been exposed as an AI-generated persona. According to Wired, the account was traced back to India, where a 22-year-old medical student created the fictitious personality as a moneymaking venture.
Sam (a pseudonym), an aspiring orthopedic surgeon from North India, was struggling to save enough money to emigrate to the US after graduation. That’s when he began looking for alternative ways of earning online.
He had tried multiple things by then, including selling study notes to other medical students by making YouTube Shorts. While scrolling through his feed one day, he thought, “Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online?”
Initially, the idea was barely profitable since his posts were “generic” photos of a beautiful, barely dressed woman on Instagram. “If you create a generic ‘hot girl,’ you’re competing with a million other models,” Gemini said when Sam asked for advice.
Sam provided multiple options to the AI platform, which chose the “MAGA/conservative niche,” terming it as a “cheat code.” According to Gemini, “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal.”
Sam created Emily Hart in January 2025 and registered her as a nurse and a look-alike of Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence. He would post images of her ice fishing, drinking Coors Light beer and shooting rounds at the rifle range.
These images would have captions such as “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).”
Every day, Sam posted pro-Christian, anti-woke, anti-immigration content
Even as a non-American, Sam became well aware of the inner workings of the MAGA ideology. “Every day, I’d write something pro-Christian, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke and anti-immigration,” he told WIRED.
Despite having doubts that the scam was extremely obvious, Sam was surprised to see that the account “blew up.”
“Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved it,” he said. Emily Hart, with the handle @emily_hart.nurse, had over 10,000 followers on Instagram in under a month, several of whom were also subscribed to her AI-generated content on OnlyFans competitor Fanvue.
With the Fanvue subscriptions and the sale of MAGA-themed T-shirts, with “PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats” written on them, Sam was making thousands of 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 said. “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.”
He even used Elon Musk‘s AI chatbot Grok to create explicit nude images of the fake influencer to upload them on Fanvue. “I was basically doing nothing. And it was just flooded with money.”
Hart’s Instagram account was taken down by Meta in February for fraudulent activity. Her Facebook account was also removed following the Wired report that exposed the scheme.
Follow on Twitter | Posted by Khadija Irfan Rahim | 
