WITH HIS DEEP brown eyes, wide grin, and almost comically chiseled body, Jae Young Joon is the platonic ideal of a hunky male influencer. On Instagram, where he has more than 320,000 followers, he regularly posts himself trying on sheet masks at home, enjoying soju and karaoke with his friends, or posing in front of the Ferris wheel at Coachella. Occasionally, he’ll promote his music, including his recent LP Pressure Release, which features a BDSM-inspired album cover, his back muscles rippling underneath a harness and chains.
It’s an impressive online presence, and Jae’s fans eat it up: his comments are filled with fire and heart-eye emoji and people praising his music. It’s not until you go back to his profile and look at his bio, which says “Human mind. AI generated,” that you realize Jae isn’t real. His friends aren’t real. His music career isn’t real. Even his trip to Coachella isn’t real.
Jae is the brainchild of Luc Thierry, a soft-spoken Canadian man in his early thirties who has been growing Jae’s account for the past few months. Even though he discloses that Jae is AI-generated 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 it is real, I'm hoping that they understand it's not real and that they're choosing to role-play or to accept that it's a fantasy, the same way you’d form a parasocial relationship with a character from a video game or a TV show,” Thierry tells me. “And I understand this is not exactly the same, but I feel like my job as the creator behind it is to indulge in that and allow them to feel like they're part of it.”
