The diabolical world of convincing AI thirst traps
CultureInside the diabolical world of very convincing AI thirst traps that are scamming gay men on social mediaThese hot, hairy-chested guys have tens of thousands of followers. They’re also not real.by Alex Abad-SantosUpdated Jul 31, 2026, 11:00 AM UTCShareGiftRose Wong for VoxAlex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.This story was originally published in The Highlight.
- ▪CultureInside the diabolical world of very convincing AI thirst traps that are scamming gay men on social mediaThese hot, hairy-chested guys have tens of thousands of followers.
- ▪They’re also not real.by Alex Abad-SantosUpdated Jul 31, 2026, 11:00 AM UTCShareGiftRose Wong for VoxAlex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care.
- ▪Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.This story was originally published in The Highlight.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,283 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Vox |
| Canonical URL | https://www.vox.com/culture/492604/ai-deepfake-gay-influencers-tiktok-thirst-traps |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 23:24:09 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T23:50:41.010Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T23:50:41.010Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Et6FrQMs2Vqu · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
CultureInside the diabolical world of very convincing AI thirst traps that are scamming gay men on social mediaThese hot, hairy-chested guys have tens of thousands of followers. They’re also not real.by Alex Abad-SantosUpdated Jul 31, 2026, 11:00 AM UTCShareGiftRose Wong for VoxAlex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.Derek Lam has more than 31,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 40,000 on X as of this writing.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Vox.
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