AI-Generated 'Comedians' Are Stealing Stand-Up Jokes to Sell Porn

By Elena Vasquez

WIRED has identified eight stand-up comedians whose viral clips have been copied verbatim by AI-generated women on Instagram — accounts that funnel audiences toward paid NSFW subscriptions and, in some cases, outperform the originals they stole from.

The story starts with Julia Jasunas. Last week, the stand-up got a DM from a fellow comic. A random Instagram influencer had lifted a joke from her act. Jasunas wasn't shocked at first; plagiarism is common in stand-up, and comics are, as she put it, "really sensitive about it, because there's not a ton of protection against it." "So we all look out for each other," she told WIRED.

Then she clicked the link.

Who is Aylen Skye?

The video showed a purported comic named Aylen Skye — a buxom blond with leonine cheekbones and 250,000 Instagram followers. Wearing a crop top and Daisy Dukes, Skye told a joke about renting a room in her two-bedroom apartment to a cute guy. It was Jasunas's joke, verbatim, down to the "ums" and "ahs."

Skye, it turned out, was not a comic. Her advertised website, 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 she probably wasn't real, either. Jasunas checked the comments section and found it uniformly positive — something no female comic experiences.

"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 said. "That's how I knew she was fake."

For Jasunas, the theft was "violating on so many different levels." "It's one thing to have your jokes stolen," she said. "It's another to funnel your work into something so sexualized, for someone else's profit."

What did Meta do about it?

Almost nothing. Jasunas reported the video to Meta for impersonation. The company told her it did not violate community guidelines, because Skye wasn't pretending to be Jasunas — she was just passing off her joke as her own. "They just didn't seem to care," Jasunas said. Most of Skye's posts are now flagged as AI content, though the account itself is not.

The pattern is broader than one account. Per WIRED's reporting:

• At least eight comics have had their videos replicated by scantily clad, AI-generated women.
• Many of the fake accounts follow each other on social media, suggesting a coordinated operation.
• All the copied videos are reworkings of already-viral stand-up clips, with better lighting, better sound, and tighter outfits — the elements that ensure virality.
• Some accounts post flirty, obviously AI-generated late-night interviews with hosts like Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, plus occasional "edgy" racist or transphobic jokes catering to the MAGA crowd.

Instagram's community guidelines prohibit impersonation, but not copying someone else's content — particularly uncopyrighted content. The platform has no prohibition on AI content, provided it's labeled. Some of these accounts are labeled. Others are not, or are labeled inconsistently. Skye did not respond to a request for comment, though the account has replied to comics 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."

How good have the clones gotten?

Comics have been complaining about this since June. Steph Clark has documented what she calls "weird pick-me AI slop" on her Instagram. In one early video, the AI stand-up was a leggy redhead on a stool, delivering a nonsensical punch line about faking orgasms with a vacant expression.

The technology has since improved exponentially. Consider Tiffany Sloane, which identifies itself as an actress and has more than 375,000 Instagram followers. Sloane presents as a pear-shaped 19-year-old with a septum piercing and a BBL, does crowd work, jokes about quarter-zips and Jimmy Buffett songs — and links to an OnlyFans profile, just like Skye. Since starting the account in August, Sloane has spread to TikTok and Facebook, building what writer Ryan Broderick calls a "super horny AI-generated short-form video content farm."

On October 3, comedian George Brett Olson posted a viral video captioned "AI stole my joke!!!" It showed a side-by-side of his bit — about Republicans ignoring AI risks in favor of manufacturing panic over illegal immigration — next to Sloane's near-identical version. Both comics stood in front of identical backdrops, wearing similar salmon shirts and khaki shorts. Only the punch line, containing an expletive in Olson's version, differed.

"I was kind of in shock," Olson told WIRED. "I just thought it was so weird to see people openly stealing in real time." His followers reported the video to Meta, which responded that it did not violate any community guidelines. "This is my intellectual property. I created it. And not only did this person or whatever steal it, they stole my likeness too."

After Olson's post, Sloane commented "sorry, won't happen again" and deleted the video, along with many other Reels. Sloane did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.

What did Adam Mosseri say?

After Olson tagged Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Mosseri responded directly. He said he did not think it was "practical for us to try and ban AI content" from Meta, but that the platform was "very invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators, and if an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that."

Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan declined to comment further, telling WIRED: "Our policies are pretty clear around this stuff, and Adam's comment speaks for itself." All of the AI-generated accounts flagged by WIRED remain on the platform.

Can the comedians sue?

Legally, their options are thin. Jokes have historically enjoyed very little copyright protection, partly because stand-up is ephemeral and many setups and punch lines have circulated in variations for years. The financial stakes are also low. University of Michigan law professor Aaron Perzanowski told NPR in 2017: "when you're talking about accusations of infringement dealing with fairly low-dollar-value creative work, we don't see a lot of litigation." An intellectual property lawyer Olson consulted said that unless Sloane was making millions on OnlyFans, a lawsuit was probably more trouble than it was worth.

Some AI-generated ripoffs now outperform the originals, and comics want protections before the problem scales. "AI is evolving very fast, and we need rules to protect creators before this becomes a bigger issue," said Mandy Martino, who also had a joke lifted by Skye. "It's not just about a joke being stolen—it's about this being a change that we need to get ahead of. And Instagram saying this isn't a problem is the scariest part."

Not everyone in tech agrees. Andreessen Horowitz partner Justine Moore publicly praised Sloane on X, calling her online presence "a genius marketing hack."

Olson isn't waiting for AI evangelists to defend the creatives whose labor is being exploited, and he doubts the "lizard-brained" commenters on Sloane's and Skye's pages care who wrote the jokes. "To me, we're asking the essential question, does the artist matter?" he said. "And to those 350,000 people that follow Tiffany Sloane, the answer is clearly no. And that's really demoralizing."