[throwforfeds]

"That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers. Some photos on Medvi’s homepage remain A.I.-generated."

Cool, another scammy internet company preying on people's insecurities. Glad the NY Times spent the effort to tell us about it and didn't spend any time questioning this company [1].

[1] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...

[karmakurtisaani]

In the US, the culture is to celebrate success and wealth. Not how you achieved them.

[1attice]

Yes and look how well that's working out for most

[xarchive]

Most of us should be honest and admit we're jealous of this guy.

He basically chose a sector where customers are desperate (weight-loss drugs), slapped a website and an interface for connecting with a drug prescription provider together, did effective marketing, and now his business generates millions a month in profit.

Like, there are a half dozen companies like his running around that essentially offer the same product and prices because they are all customer interfaces stop the same provider.

[1attice]

Speak for yourself. My skin crawls.

Do not universalize your temptation to graft

[rdevilla]

Just the other day I was downvoted and called out for suggesting that perverse incentives are hard to resist, yet here we are with the Times (apparently) showcasing another such instance.

In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though, so it is immaterial if an "artist's depiction" (artificial agent's depiction) is of a real person or purely hallucinated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581021

[georgemcbay]

> In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though

When injected. One of the products this scam company was selling is oral Tirzepatide pills, which don't do anything.

[Arodex]

You got played by a scammer.

https://bsky.app/profile/masnick.com/post/3miwsjejfhk2i

"Turns out basically every aspect of that story is bullshit and the story should be retracted."

[zcw100]

This is just like when Paypal got started and was basically operating their own bank. Good luck doing that without getting in trouble. This is selling pharmaceutical drugs over the internet. You're playing chicken with going to jail they just happened to get lucky.

[karmakurtisaani]

Yeah, I didn't mean it as a positive thing..

[bdangubic]

“working out for most” is socialism ;)

[1attice]

Anyone else notice how these days "socialism" means "functional UX on your civ"?

[jimbokun]

I’m pretty sure the writer included this and other details precisely so that readers would understand the ethics of this company.

[throwforfeds]

I had a few people from my life send me this article because they know I've been a software engineer for 20 years and were thinking "wow, see you could do this too!". None of them noticed they were misleading customers. None of them knew the FDA sent them a warning. All of them thought this person was really smart for using AI to create a company on his own, no other humans involved.

So maybe the NY Times thought it was enough to make people question the ethics of the company to add a sentence or two of "AI-generated images/website", but in reality I think people read this as a positive solo entrepreneurship story and missed the ethical grey area and the fact that this indeed took thousands of unseen humans to build.

[bonsai_spool]

> I’m pretty sure the writer included this and other details precisely so that readers would understand the ethics of this company.

Maybe, but it felt like this was meant to support the idea that the company is scrappy / under construction.