Meet The AI Influencers Grifting Your Parents feat. Ej Dickson (Premium E345) Sample

QAA Podcast

Julian Feeld, Travis View & Jake Rockatansky

News

4.3 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2026

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Are those “small business owners” selling trinkets on Tik Tok actually real? Are those ripped gay hunks on Twitter just AI? Do people even care about the distinction between “fake” and “real” in the content they see online? In this episode we dive into the various ways people are deploying AI entities on social media: from the scammy, to the benign, to the sadistic and abusive. Travis unpacks the recent controversy over an Australian influencer who was caught using AI to promote her dubious charity as well the strange trend of videos of fake belt buckle makers. Later the boys are joined by Ej Dickson, senior culture writer at WIRED and author of One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate. Dickson shares the perspective she’s gained on reporting on influencer culture, parasocial relationships, and AI manipulation. Along the way the crew ponders whether humanity will actually have to lose a war to AI in order to get plugged into an illusory Matrix-like world or if people will walk into it willingly so long as they can interact with their favorite synthetic influencers. EJ Dickson on Twitter https://x.com/ejdickson?s=20 EJ Dickson on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/ejdickson.bsky.social One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate By Ej Dickson https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/One-Bad-Mother/Ej-Dickson/9781668051115 SOURCES This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men https://www.wired.com/story/ai-generated-maga-girls/ Australian influencer Lily Jay’s tangled web of AI manipulation https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-05/lily-jay-foundation-posts-ai-generated-misleading-videos/106866422 AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/938844/ai-tiktok-shop-blackface-shein-dropshipping Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Okay, now we're recording. I don't know. That was so weird. How low can I go?
0:05.0	His file path way, way, way, way, way, way, way. Well, that answers that question.
0:19.9	Well, we got to the bottom of that one.
0:22.3	I'm always trying to push my body to the new limits.
0:24.8	What tricks can I work?
0:26.1	Your pipes.
0:27.1	Fucking hell, my connection's all fucked up.
0:29.1	Why breaking up for you guys?
0:30.4	Yeah, kind of.
0:31.4	God damn it.
0:32.2	This is what our show would sound like if we didn't decide to write every episode out.
0:36.9	Yeah.
0:37.3	People still can't believe that when
0:38.8	i tell it to them like they're like so what is it they're like tell me like what's it you know
0:43.4	what's your process like and i'm like well first like you know we find something we're interested in and then
0:48.3	somebody or you know a handful of people will we'll tackle the script and it's like you know anywhere
0:52.9	from like 15 to 30 pages,
0:55.0	like, and they were like, what? Yeah, you know, I feel like podcasting is still such an
1:00.5	immature medium that the act of planning ahead and giving a shit about the quality just this sets
1:07.0	you apart from the pack. Yeah, that's funny. It reminds me of this time I was at a bar a while back with a friend and was talking to the guy next to me.
1:14.8	And he asked me what I do.
1:15.9	And so I was trying to explain the pod. This was before the rebrand. So I had to do the dance of like, we cover QAnon, but we're not pro Q&on. So I think he figured out that we were not conservatives like he was because then he started asking me about the process of making an episode and what goes into it.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 22 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Julian Feeld, Travis View & Jake Rockatansky, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Julian Feeld, Travis View & Jake Rockatansky and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.