Last week, comedian Julia Jasunas was on Instagram when she received a DM from a fellow comedian. Did she know, her friend wrote, that a random Instagram influencer had ripped a joke from her stand-up routine?
At first, Jasunas was angry but not too shocked. Plagiarism is not uncommon in the stand-up world, and comics are “very sensitive about it, because there’s not a lot of protection against it,” she told WIRED. “So we all look out for each other.” Then she clicked on the link.
The video was of a purported stand-up comedian named Aylen Skye, a buxom blonde with leonine cheekbones and 250,000 followers on Instagram. In the clip, Skye, wearing a crop top and Daisy Dukes, tells a joke about renting a room in her two-bedroom apartment to a cute guy. To Jasunas’s great surprise, it was, verbatim, his joke, right down to the “uhs” and “ahs.”
Whoever Skye was, she didn’t seem like a comic; the website she advertised in her video, AylenTV.com, redirects 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 she not seem like a comic book, but she also didn’t seem real. After checking out Skye’s comments section, Jasunas was pretty convinced that she was an AI.
“You look at the comments section of a female comic 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 the comments were positive. “That’s how I knew it was fake,” she deadpans.
For Jasunas, being ripped off by a sexy AI-generated comedian was “a violation on so many different levels.” “It’s one thing to have your jokes stolen,” she said. “It’s another to channel your work into something so sexualized, for someone else’s benefit.” She immediately reported the video to Meta for impersonation, but says Meta told her she wasn’t violating community guidelines because Skye wasn’t pretending to. be Jasunas; it was just passing off his joke as his own. “They just didn’t seem to care,” Jasunas says. (The majority of Skye’s posts are now flagged as AI content, although the account itself is not.)
Jasunas is far from the only stand-up comedian to have been targeted by Skye. Skye also doesn’t appear to be the only AI-generated Hot Girl account targeting comics. WIRED identified eight comics whose videos were mirrored by AI-generated scantily clad women, many of whom follow each other on social media. All the videos are copies of already successful viral stand-up clips, except the AI-generated counterparts are played in front of a larger audience, with better lighting, better sound, and tighter outfits – essentially, all the elements necessary to ensure virality. The accounts also post clearly AI-generated late-night TV show interviews with hosts like Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, as well as occasional “edgy” racist or transphobic jokes aimed at the MAGA crowd.
Although Instagram’s Community Guidelines prohibit impersonation, these policies do not extend to copying someone else’s content, particularly if that content is not protected by copyright. The platform also does not impose any bans against AI content, as long as it is properly labeled as such. Some accounts are labeled as AI-generated, but others are not, or their videos are labeled inconsistently. (Skye did not respond to a request for comment, although she has commented on numerous stand-up comic videos, calling it “if you focused on putting out content instead of posting whinnily (sic) posts like this, you’d be as successful as me,” he wrote on a comic’s Instagram post.)
Gn entert
