AI ‘comedians’ on Instagram steal real stand-up jokes to sell OnlyFans

An Instagram account called Aylen Skye has a quarter of a million followers, a blond stand-up persona and a bit about renting the spare room of her apartment to a cute guy. The bit belongs to the comedian Julia Jasunas, word for word, down to the “ums” and “ahs”, and Aylen Skye does not appear to be a real person. As Wired reported, the website promoted in the clip redirects to adult content on Fanvue, a subscription platform that competes with OnlyFans and markets itself to AI creators.

Wired identified eight comics whose viral clips have been rebuilt by AI-generated women, many of whom follow one another. The copies keep the original routine and upgrade everything around it: a bigger crowd, cleaner sound, better light and tighter clothes. Some now draw more views than the human originals. Anyone who posts creative work on Instagram is exposed to the same thing, because a clip that performs well can become the raw material for someone else’s subscription funnel.

Jasunas found out from a fellow comic who sent her the link, and the giveaway was the comments. Women in stand-up are used to men berating them under every clip, she told Wired, yet every comment under Skye’s videos was warm. “That’s how I knew she was fake,” she said. The clones have also learned new tricks. The accounts post flirty, AI-made late-night interviews with hosts such as Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, and the faces have improved so fast that telling them apart from real women is getting hard.

The second account Wired examined, Tiffany Sloane, calls itself an actress, has more than 375,000 Instagram followers, also posts on TikTok and Facebook, and links to an OnlyFans page. The comedian George Brett Olson posted a side-by-side video captioned “AI stole my joke!!!” that shows his set next to Sloane’s: the same backdrop, a similar salmon shirt and khaki shorts, and only the punch line changed. Once the video spread, the Sloane account commented “sorry, won’t happen again” and deleted that clip along with many other Reels.

Reports to Meta have gone nowhere so far. Jasunas filed an impersonation complaint and was told the video broke no rules, because Skye was passing off the joke as its own rather than pretending to be her. Instagram bans impersonation but not copying, and it allows AI content as long as it carries a label, which several of these accounts apply inconsistently or not at all. Instagram head Adam Mosseri replied to Olson that banning AI content was not “practical,” while adding that if an AI creator is “ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that.” A Meta spokesperson told Wired that Mosseri’s comment “speaks for itself.” Every account Wired flagged is still online.

The law offers comedians little cover. Jokes have historically had weak copyright protection, partly because stand-up is performed live and setups get recycled across the circuit, and the sums involved rarely justify a lawsuit. Olson says an intellectual property lawyer told him suing would only make sense if Sloane were making millions on OnlyFans. Some in the tech industry see the accounts differently: Justine Moore, a partner at the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, praised Sloane’s online presence on X as “a genius marketing hack.”

Comics have been flagging these clone accounts since June, when the stand-up Steph Clark started documenting them on her own Instagram; the early versions were stiff and easy to spot. The Sloane account opened in August, and Olson’s side-by-side went up on October 3. Mandy Martino, another comedian whose joke Skye lifted, wants platform rules “to protect creators before this becomes a bigger issue.”

Olson put the question to Wired plainly: “does the artist matter?” For the 350,000 people following Tiffany Sloane, he said, “the answer is clearly no.”

Tags: meta, instagram, OnlyFans, Adam Mosseri, AI influencers, Fanvue