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...
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.
Do not universalize your temptation to graft
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.
When injected. One of the products this scam company was selling is oral Tirzepatide pills, which don't do anything.
https://bsky.app/profile/masnick.com/post/3miwsjejfhk2i
"Turns out basically every aspect of that story is bullshit and the story should be retracted."
Maybe, but it felt like this was meant to support the idea that the company is scrappy / under construction.
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.