American stand-up comedians say AI-made social media accounts are copying their jokes to win followers and make money. Several of them told news agency AFP that their routines were taken without permission or credit.
AFP found several sexualised, AI-generated personalities on Instagram and TikTok that used jokes from real comedians. It was not clear who ran the accounts. Some of them sent viewers to paid subscription services known to host pornography.
“This is a huge issue that’s only going to keep getting worse,” Los Angeles comedian Julia Jasunas told AFP. She said the experience felt “violating”.
An account called “Aylen Skye” used a joke about kissing a roommate that Jasunas had worked on for years. The account had more than 230,000 Instagram followers and a Meta verified tick before it was removed.
The account still exists on TikTok. The video using her joke is one of dozens like it, each with tens of thousands of views. The page links to Fanvue, a platform that carries adult content from AI models.
“That upset me,” Jasunas said. “You’re funnelling my intellectual property into some sexual thing for profit, and that grossed me out.”
Jasunas asked social media companies to act. “Any kind of social media platform has the technology and has the power and the money to put into more stringent regulations on AI,” she told AFP. “I think that they have a duty to do that.”
Meta, which owns Instagram, did not immediately comment, AFP reported. A TikTok spokesperson pointed AFP to its community guidelines. Those rules ban content that violates another user’s intellectual property rights.
New York comedian Olivia Carter told AFP she has stopped sharing new material on social media. She said one reason was a fear that AI accounts would repeat her sets and spoil them for live audiences.
One AI video copied her joke about asking out a personal trainer. She once told that joke on TV host Jimmy Fallon’s show. “It’s a very sexualized version of a woman,” Carter said. “Comedy shouldn’t be about that.”
California comedian George Brett Olson said an avatar called “Tiffany Sloane” copied his whole performance. The account has more than 370,000 followers and is linked to OnlyFans.
“It’s on the stage I was on,” Olson said. “She’s wearing the same outfit I wore. It’s exactly the same joke, except she butchered the punchline.”
Michael Smith, a professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University, said comedians once had an unwritten rule against stealing jokes. “Now it’s become difficult to enforce in the presence of large language models scraping up all the world’s information,” he told AFP.
Smith said the AI pages take clicks and money from artists who use social media to build an audience and get bookings.
Olson posted a complaint on Instagram, and the platform’s head, Adam Mosseri, replied. Mosseri wrote that banning AI was not “practical”. He wrote that Meta was “very invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators.”
“If an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that,” Mosseri wrote. “I’m not sure what it would be.”
Olson told AFP the reply was “a big nothing-burger.” “Meta allowed this to happen,” he said.
Source: this article is based on reporting by IOL Entertainment. Image: IOL Entertainment. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Entertainment desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Rirhandzu Baloyi writes about entertainment for Tzaneen Voice. Rirhandzu covers South African music, film, TV, streaming, awards and celebrity news, from amapiano and local soapies to Showmax and Netflix releases. Stories stick to what happened, who was involved and when fans can watch or listen.