Last week, the stand-up comedian Julia Jasunas was on Instagram when she got a DM from a fellow comic. Did she know, her friend wrote, that a random Instagram influencer had ripped off a joke from her stand-up act?
Initially, Jasunas was mad but not overly shocked. Plagiarism is not uncommon in the stand-up comedy world, and comics are “really sensitive about it, because there’s not a ton of protection against it,” she tells WIRED. “So we all look out for each other.” Then she clicked on the link.
The video was of a purported stand-up comic named Aylen Skye, a buxom blond with leonine cheekbones and 250,000 Instagram followers. In the clip, Skye, wearing a crop top and Daisy Dukes, tells a joke about renting out a room in her two-bedroom apartment to a cute guy. To Jasunas’ shock, it was, verbatim, her joke, down to the “ums” and “ahs.”
Whoever Skye was, she didn’t appear to be a comic; the website she advertised in her video, AylenTV.com, redirected to NSFW content on Fanvue, a subscription-based OnlyFans competitor that markets itself as the “No1 AI monetisation platform for creators.” And not only did she appear to not be a comic, she also didn’t seem to be real. After looking at Skye’s comments section, Jasunas was fairly convinced she was AI.
“You look at any female comic’s comments section and you’ll see all these men berating her, objectifying her body, saying she’s not funny or the joke is bad,” she says. But with Skye, all of the comments were positive. “That’s how I knew she was fake,” she deadpans.
For Jasunas, being ripped off by a sexy AI-generated comedian was “violating on so many different levels.” “It’s one thing to have your jokes stolen,” she says. “It’s another to funnel your work into something so sexualized, for someone else’s profit.” She immediately reported the video to Meta for impersonation, but says Meta told her it did not violate community guidelines because Skye wasn’t pretending to be Jasunas; it was just passing off her joke as its own. “They just didn’t seem to care,” Jasunas says. (The majority of Skye’s posts are now flagged as AI content, though the account itself is not.)
Jasunas is far from the only stand-up comic to have been targeted by Skye. Nor does Skye appear 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 already-successful viral stand-up clips, except the AI-generated counterparts are playing to bigger audiences, with better lighting, better sound, and more skintight outfits—essentially, all the elements required to ensure virality. The accounts also post flirty, clearly AI-generated late-night TV show interviews with hosts like Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, as well as the occasional “edgy” racist or transphobic joke catering to the MAGA crowd.
Though Instagram’s community guidelines prohibit impersonation, such policies don’t extend to copying someone else’s content, particularly if that content isn’t copyrighted. The platform also does not have any prohibitions against AI content, so long as it is appropriately labeled as such. Some of the accounts are labeled as AI-generated—but others are not, or their videos are inconsistently labeled. (Skye did not respond to a request for comment, though it has commented on many stand-up comics’ videos calling it out: “if you focused on putting out content instead of making whinny [sic] posts like this, you’d be as successful as me,” it wrote on one comic’s Instagram post.)