AI-generated hot girls challenge comedians to enhance their manic content

A network of AI-generated models use comic material to push views to their OnlyFans and Fanvue accounts — and comedians can't help it.

Last week, stand-up comedian Julia Jasonas was on Instagram when she received a DM from a fellow comic. Did she know that some random Instagram influencer took a joke out of her stand-up?

At first Jasonas was mad but not too shocked. Plagiarism is not uncommon in the world of stand-up comedy, and comics are "really picky about it because there's not a lot of protection against it," he tells WIRED. "So we all look out for each other." Then he clicked on the link.

The video was of a stand-up comic named Aileen Skye, who has a luscious blonde with leonine cheeks and 250,000 Instagram followers. In the clip, Skye, wearing a crop top and Daisy Dukes, tells Jockey about renting out a room in her two-bedroom apartment to a cute guy. To Jasonas surprise, this was literally his joke, down to the "ums" and "ahs".

Whoever Skye was, she didn't seem like a comic. The website he promoted in his video led to NSFW content on Fanvue, a subscription-based competitor to OnlyFans that bills itself as "the #1 AI monetization platform for creators." And not only did he not look like a comic, he didn't look real. After looking at Skye's comment section, Jasonas was fairly convinced that she was an AI.

"You look at the comments section of any female comic and you see all these men bashing her, objectifying her body and saying it's not funny or it's a bad joke," she says. But with Skye, all the comments were positive. "That's how I knew she was fake," she says.

For Jasons, being trashed by a sexy AI-generated comedian "is a violation on many levels." "It's one thing to have your jokes stolen," he says. "It's another thing to direct your work towards something very sexual, for someone else's benefit." He immediately reported the video to Metta for impersonation, but says Metta told him the video didn't violate community guidelines because Skye wasn't impersonating Jasons. It just took his joke as his own. "They didn't seem to care," Jasonas says. (Most Skye posts are now flagged as AI content, although the account itself is not.)

Jasons isn't the only stand-up comic targeted by Skye. Skye doesn't seem to be the only AI-generated hot girl account targeting comics. WIRED has identified eight comics whose videos have been replicated by scantily clad, AI-generated women, many of whom follow each other on social media. All of the videos are copies of previously successful viral stand-up clips, except the AI-generated counterparts are played to a larger audience, with better lighting, better sound, and tighter clothing—basically all the elements needed to ensure virality. These accounts also post witty, distinctly AI-powered late-night TV interviews with hosts like Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, as well as the occasional racist or transphobic joke for the MAGA crowd.

Although Instagram's community guidelines prohibit impersonation, such policies do not include copying someone else's content, especially if that content is not copyrighted. The platform also has no restrictions on artificial intelligence content, as long as it is properly labeled as such. Some accounts are labeled as AI-generated, while others are not, or their videos are labeled inconsistently. (Skye did not respond to a request for comment, though he has commented on many of the stand-up comic's videos, calling it "If you focused on publishing content instead of making sad posts like this, you'd be as successful as I am.")

What's interesting about the comics being removed is that some of the AI-generated videos perform better than the originals, increasing the protection of original content on Instagram. Mandy Martino, who also had one of his jokes pulled by Skye, said: "AI is evolving very quickly and we need laws to protect creators before it becomes a bigger problem. It's not just about a joke being stolen, it's a change we need to get ahead of. And Instagram saying it's not a problem is the scariest part.

Comics have been complaining about AI accounts stealing their content since June, with stand-up artist Steph Clark regularly documenting such "weird AI changes" on Instagram. In one of the early videos, the AI ​​stand-up in question is a leggy redhead sitting on a stool awkwardly delivering a rant. The punch line comparing a fake orgasm to being a bad cook, a blank look on her face.

However, in the months since, the technology for such simulated videos has improved exponentially, to the point where it's difficult to tell if the women in the videos are actually real people. One such example is Tiffany Sloan, who describes herself as an actress in her Instagram bio, where she has more than 375,000 followers. Sloane, a 19-year-old pear-shaped bombshell with a septum piercing and BBL, takes to her Instagram page to do crowd-pleasing jams to songs by Quarter Zip and Jimmy Buffett - who, like Skye, also includes a Highlights link to her OnlyFans profile.

Since launching her Instagram account in August, Sloan has built up a huge following and is also on TikTok and Facebook, where she's created, in the words of writer Ryan Broderick, "a farm of short-form video content produced by super-horny AI." On October 3, comedian George Brett Olson released a viral video titled "AI Stole My Joke!" published Showing a side-by-side comparison of his stand-up — a joke about how Republicans are ignoring the dangers of AI in favor of panicking about illegal immigration — next to Sloan's nearly identical example. In both clips, the comics stand in front of identical backgrounds, wearing salmon shirts and khaki shorts. Only the punchline, which has an expletive in Olson's version, is different.

"I was kind of in shock when I first saw Sloan's video," Olson tells WIRED, "I just thought it was so weird to see people blatantly stealing in real time." He says his followers told him they reported it to Metta, and Metta responded by saying that Sloan's video didn't violate any community guidelines. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "This is my intellectual property. I created it. And not only did this person or whatever steal it, they stole my likeness."

After Olson made her video calling out Sloan, she was flooded with comments from fellow stand-ups and fans who supported her and promised to report Sloan's account to Instagram. Even Sloan left a comment on Olson's page saying, "Sorry, won't happen again," before deleting his video, as well as many other Reels on Olson's page. (Sloane did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.)

Ultimately, though, Olson was frustrated by the inaction at the end of the meta. After tagging Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Mosseri responded that while he doesn't think it's "practical for us to ban AI content from the meta," the platform is "invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators, and if an AI creator is removing content in a big way, it's good for us to see what we can do about it."

In response to WIRED, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan declined to comment further, saying, "Our policies on these matters are very clear, and Adam's comment speaks for itself." All AI-generated accounts flagged by WIRED are still on the platform.

For now, comedians can do something about AI creators who "rip off content wholesale." Legally speaking, jokes have historically enjoyed very little copyright protection, in part due to the ephemeral nature of stand-up and the fact that many setups and punch lines have been used in the industry, with slight variations, for years. "When you're talking about allegations of infringement of relatively low-dollar creative works, it's relatively rare," Aaron Prezanowski, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, told NPR in 2017. (Olson says that sentiment was echoed by an intellectual property attorney he consulted, who he claims told him that unless Sloan was making millions from OnlyFans, threatening to sue would probably be more trouble than it was worth.)

The negative sentiment against these AI-generated creators doesn't seem to be shared by some in the tech industry, such as Andreessen Horowitz partner Justin Moore, who publicly praised Sloan in an X post, calling his online presence "a genius marketing hack."

Olson isn't so optimistic that AI evangelists will rush to the defense of creatives whose work is being exploited. Because of this, he doesn't believe that the "lizard brain" commenters posting the horned comments about Sloane and Skye's pages particularly care if they're real or who actually made the jokes they're telling in their viral clips.

"For me, we're asking the fundamental question, does the artist matter?" he says And to those 350,000 people who follow Tiffany Sloan, the answer is clearly no. And that's really demoralizing.