A new dating app for gay men has launched recently.

A new dating app for gay men has launched recently. It's called Goose. It wants to be the Cool Boys alternative to Grindr, and it's been marketing itself as a place for gay men to find relationships as opposed to just hookups. And priding itself on the fact that every application is getting screened by a human. Sounds great until you have a bunch of the people who are getting reached out to by ambassadors of the app realising that all the ambassadors are AI generated. There are a bunch of Instagram accounts that are newly created with images of attractive gay men who are actually in fact all made by Google's image generator. We know this because the people who are getting reached out to in their DMs are getting the same message from multiple accounts. And Google has SynthID, which allows you to take an image, feed it through their own detection model and verify that those images have been in fact made by one of Google's models. One of the founders (who used to do community growth at the social app of BeReal) posted on his own Instagram a few weeks ago saying he had opportunities for gay men to become ambassadors of the project he's working on. The ambassador role would require someone to help manage three Instagram accounts for four hours a day for two plus months with rates at 1800 to 2100 dollars a month. I think we would be surprised if we realised how many things that we see in social media today are undisclosed ads (and undisclosed AI). I feel like that's a trend on the uprise, but this feels particularly insidious to try to advertise the community that you're building on your app by generating images of people who are not real to do the outreach on your app's behalf. If you're building a community based on trust, which is especially important in the queer community, and in an app whose founding is supposedly on the premise of long term relationships which need trust, I feel like this is not a good place to start.