The guys behind your favorite gay thirst traps

With its depth Brown eyes, a wide smile, and an almost comically sculpted body, Jae Young Joon He is the platonic ideal of the influential man. on Instagramwhere he has more than 320,000 followers, regularly posts himself trying on sheet masks at home, enjoying soju and karaoke with his friends, or demonstrate In front of the ferris wheel Coachella. Sometimes, he promotes his music, including his latest album Release pressure, Which features a BDSM-inspired album cover, and his back muscles rippling under the belt and chains.

He’s an impressive online presence, and Jay’s fans are eating it up: his comments are full of fire and eye and heart emojis and people are praising his music. It’s only after you go back to his profile and look at his bio that you realize Jay isn’t real that you realize “Human Brain. Created by Artificial Intelligence.” His friends aren’t real. His music career is not real. Even his trip to Coachella isn’t real.

Jay is the brainchild of Luke Terry, a soft-spoken Canadian man in his early 30s who has been growing Jay’s account over the past few months. Although he revealed that Jay was created by AI on his profile, he says most of his followers ignore it or choose to pretend otherwise.

“When I see people responding in a way that feels real, I hope they understand that it’s not real and that they’re choosing to role-play or accept that it’s just fantasy, in the same way you form a parasocial relationship with a character from a video game or TV show,” Terry tells me. “And I understand that it’s not quite the same, but I feel like my job as the creative behind it is to immerse themselves in that and let them feel like they’re a part of it.”

Terry is part of a cadre of creators who create content primarily for a gay, male audience — although Terry says he was surprised to find that the majority of Jay’s audience is female. Creators are in a group chat together. They regularly like and comment on each other’s posts, and often collaborate with each other to grow their audiences.

Earlier this week, two of the characters, Santos Walker and Caleb Ellis, went viral after they “appeared” on the red carpet for the film’s premiere. The devil wears prada 2. “I’m feeling sick. While browsing Instagram, I came across a whole bunch of AI models/calculations,” Writer and Editor Mikkel Street books.

Santos and Caleb’s red carpet appearance sparked backlash online, with some assuming the post was sponsored by 20th Century Studios, the film’s distributor. This was not actually the case; WIRED has confirmed that the creator of the “Santos” account took the photo without the studio’s involvement, intending the post to serve as the online equivalent of a red carpet crash. The creator even penned an elaborate narrative for the post, imagining that a wealthy film producer had taken Santos and Caleb to Hollywood on a private jet. (20th Century Studios did not respond to a request for comment.)

Although the post was not a sponcon, it sparked an online debate about whether AI-generated influencers like Santos and his ilk are deceiving their audiences or setting a dangerous precedent for the future of branded content.

“We currently have human influencers,” one person said books On X. “So, the next step is to create 100% manageable fake influencers from scratch for the sole purpose of marketing movies, shows, products, etc?” Others mocked Santos and Caleb’s followers and those who look at their comically large frames, sparking discourse about how AI models propagate unrealistic body standards in the gay community.