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On Thursday, the New York Times published a glowing profile of a company called Medvi. The basic premise of the piece is that a single guy named Matthew Gallagher had used AI to rapidly build a pharmaceutical enterprise that’s on track to do nearly $2 billion in sales this year, while hiring only a skeleton crew of humans to operate the vast AI-powered venture. According to the NYT, it’s a stunning achievement that heralds a new era of business; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who predicted the rise of this kind of company back in 2024, told the newspaper that he’d “like to meet the guy” behind the project.
“A $1.8 billion company with just two employees?” the NYT rhapsodized. “In the age of AI, it’s increasingly possible.”
The NYT‘s tech coverage is generally pretty solid. But the framing of its story, and what it left out, left us pretty stunned. That’s because back in May of last year, we ran our own investigation of Medvi — and not only was what we found far more disturbing than the NYT‘s credulous story let on, but the situation has gotten even worse since then.
We first came across Medvi when we saw an AI-generated advertisement plastered at the foot of a local news article. It showed a mangled AI-generated image of an Ozempic package, loaded with misshapen words and a garbled attempt at the logo of Novo Nordisk, the drug company that produces it.
When we clicked the ad, it brought us to Medvi’s website, which promised that visitors could “lose 40 pounds by July with GLP-1 medication.” It was dripping with before-and-after photos showing dramatic weight loss journeys, rapturous testimonials from patients, and authoritative headshots of “incredible doctors we’ve partnered with.”
The closer we looked, though, the sleazier the whole thing started to feel. The smiling models featured on the site were clearly AI-generated, giving an immediate sense of chicanery. And when we contacted one of the doctors who Medvi claimed it was working with, he told us he had no involvement with the company and demanded that it “remove me from their sites.”
And when we examined the before-and-after photos, we found evidence of even worse behavior.
One showed a customer identified as “Michael P,” who it said had lost 48 pounds while achieving “17 percent increased muscle” and “55 percent sleep improvement,” his protruding stomach replaced with sharply-defined abdominal muscles. But when we dug into the origin of the photo, we found that “Michael” was actually a random Redditor who lost a bunch of weight in the mid-2010s — long before the advent of GLP-1s for weight loss — after giving up alcohol. His striking weight loss photos were featured in Bored Panda and Daily Mail articles dating back to 2017 and 2018. The only thing that was changed was his face, which Medvi appeared to have altered using AI.
The images of the woman identified as “Sandra K,” meanwhile, were stolen from a Newsweek article published in 2021. And the images used for “Melissa C” have been floating around the web for almost a decade; they were even featured in the same Bored Panda piece that “Michael P” was. Everyone’s face had been altered except for Melissa, and each image was accompanied with tales of how many pounds each person lost and the health benefits they allegedly experienced as a result.
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