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Last week, the stand-up comedian<\/a> Julia Jasunas was on Instagram<\/a> when she got a DM from a fellow comic. Did she know, her friend wrote, that a random Instagram influencer<\/a> had ripped off a joke from her stand-up act?<\/p>\n Initially, Jasunas was mad but not overly shocked. Plagiarism is not uncommon in the stand-up comedy world, and comics are \u201creally sensitive about it, because there’s not a ton of protection against it,\u201d she tells WIRED. \u201cSo we all look out for each other.\u201d Then she clicked on the link.<\/p>\n The video was of a purported stand-up comic named Aylen Skye<\/a>, 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\u2019 shock, it was, verbatim, her joke,<\/a> down to the \u201cums\u201d and \u201cahs.\u201d<\/p>\n Whoever Skye was, she didn\u2019t 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 \u201cNo1 AI monetisation platform for creators.\u201d And not only did she appear to not be a comic, she also didn\u2019t seem to be real. After looking at Skye\u2019s comments section, Jasunas was fairly convinced she was AI.<\/p>\n \u201cYou look at any female comic\u2019s comments section and you\u2019ll see all these men berating her, objectifying her body, saying she\u2019s not funny or the joke is bad,\u201d she says. But with Skye, all of the comments were positive. \u201cThat\u2019s how I knew she was fake,\u201d she deadpans.<\/p>\n For Jasunas, being ripped off by a sexy AI-generated comedian was \u201cviolating on so many different levels.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to have your jokes stolen,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s another to funnel your work into something so sexualized, for someone else\u2019s profit.\u201d She immediately reported the video to Meta for impersonation, but says Meta told her it did not violate community guidelines because Skye wasn\u2019t pretending to be<\/em> Jasunas; it was just passing off her joke as its own. \u201cThey just didn\u2019t seem to care,\u201d Jasunas says. (The majority of Skye\u2019s posts are now flagged as AI content, though the account itself is not.)<\/p>\n 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\u2014essentially, all the elements required to ensure virality. The accounts also post flirty, clearly AI-generated late-night TV show interviews<\/a> with hosts like Conan O\u2019Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, as well as the occasional \u201cedgy\u201d racist or transphobic<\/a> joke catering to the MAGA crowd.<\/p>\n Though Instagram\u2019s community guidelines prohibit impersonation, such policies don\u2019t extend to copying someone else\u2019s content, particularly if that content isn\u2019t 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\u2014but 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\u2019 videos calling it out: \u201cif you focused on putting out content instead of making whinny [sic] posts like this, you\u2019d be as successful as me,\u201d it wrote on one comic\u2019s Instagram post.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n