Last week, the stand-up comedian Julia Jasunas was on Instagram when she got a DM from a fellow comic. Did she know, her friend wrote, that a random Instagram influencer had ripped off a joke from her stand-up act?

Initially, Jasunas was mad but not overly shocked. Plagiarism is not uncommon in the stand-up comedy world, and comics are “really sensitive about it, because there's not a ton of protection against it,” she tells WIRED. “So we all look out for each other.”

Then she clicked on the link. The video was of a purported stand-up comic named Aylen Skye, 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’ shock, it was, verbatim, her joke, down to the “ums” and “ahs.”

Whoever Skye was, she didn’t 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 “No1 AI monetisation platform for creators.”And not only did she appear to not be a comic, she also didn’t seem to be real. After looking at Skye’s comments section, Jasunas was fairly convinced she was AI.

“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 says. But with Skye, all of the comments were positive. “That’s how I knew she was fake,” she deadpans.

For Jasunas, being ripped off by a sexy AI-generated comedian was “violating on so many different levels.”“It’s one thing to have your jokes stolen,” she says. “It’s another to funnel your work into something so sexualized, for someone else’s profit.”She immediately reported the video to Meta for impersonation, but says Meta told her it did not violate community guidelines because Skye wasn’t pretending to be Jasunas; it was just passing off her joke as its own.

“They just didn’t seem to care,” Jasunas says. (The majority of Skye’s posts are now flagged as AI content, though the account itself is not.) 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—essentially, all the elements required to ensure virality. The accounts also post flirty, clearly AI-generated late-night TV show interviews with hosts like Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, as well as the occasional “edgy” racist or transphobic joke catering to the MAGA crowd.

Though Instagram’s community guidelines prohibit impersonation, such policies don’t extend to copying someone else’s content, particularly if that content isn’t 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—but 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’ videos 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,” it wrote on one comic’s Instagram post.)

Particularly grating to the comics being ripped off is that some of the AI-generated videos perform better than the originals, spawning calls for increased protections for original content on Instagram. “AI is evolving very fast, and we need rules to protect creators before this becomes a bigger issue,” says Mandy Martino, who also had one of her jokes 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.”Comics have been complaining about AI accounts stealing their content since June, with the stand-up Steph Clark regularly documenting such “weird pick-me AI slop” on her Instagram.

In one early video, the AI stand-up in question is a leggy redhead sitting on a stool, awkwardly delivering a nonsensical punch line comparing faking orgasms to being a bad cook, a vacant expression on its face. In the following months, however, the technology for such clone videos has improved exponentially, to the degree that it’s difficult to tell whether or not the women in the videos are actually real people. One such example is Tiffany Sloane, which identifies itself as an actress in its bio on Instagram, where it has more than 375,000 followers. A pear-shaped 19-year-old bombshell with a septum piercing and a BBL, Sloane does crowd work and jokes about quarter-zips and Jimmy Buffett songs on its Instagram page—which, similar to Skye, also includes a Highlights link to its OnlyFans profile.

Since starting the Instagram account in August, Sloane amassed a robust following and is also on TikTok and Facebook, where it has built out a “super horny AI-generated short-form video content farm,” as the writer Ryan Broderick puts it. On October 3, the comedian George Brett Olson posted a viral video captioned “AI stole my joke!!!” showing a side-by-side comparison of his stand-up bit—a joke about how Republicans ignore the risks of AI in favor of manufacturing panic over illegal immigration—next to Sloane’s near-identical one.

In both clips, the comics are standing in front of identical backdrops and wearing similar salmon shirts and khaki shorts. Only the punch line, which features an expletive in Olson’s version, is different.

“I was kind of in shock,” Olson tells WIRED of seeing Sloane’s video for the first time. “I just thought it was so weird to see people openly stealing in real time.”He says his followers told him they reported it to Meta, and according to them, Meta responded by saying Sloane’s video did not violate any community guidelines. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “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 made his video calling out Sloane, he was flooded with comments from fellow stand-ups and fans supporting him and vowing to report Sloane’s account to Instagram. Even Sloane weighed in, leaving a comment on Olson’s page saying, “sorry, won’t happen again” before deleting its video, as well as many other Reels on its page. (Sloane didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

Ultimately, however, Olson was dispirited by the inaction on Meta’s end. After tagging Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Mosseri responded by saying that while he did not think it was “practical for us to try and ban AI content” from Meta, 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.”

Responding to WIRED, Francis Brennan, a spokesperson for Meta, declined to comment further, saying, “Our policies are pretty clear around this stuff, and Adam’s comment speaks for itself.”All of the AI-generated accounts flagged by WIRED are still on the platform.

As of now, there’s very little that comedians can do about AI creators “ripping off content wholesale.”Legally, jokes have historically enjoyed very little copyright protection, in part due to the ephemeral nature of stand-up and the fact that many setups and punch lines have been used in the industry, with slightly different variations, for years. There’s also the matter of the financial stakes being relatively low, according to Aaron Perzanowski, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, who 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." (Olson says this sentiment was echoed by an intellectual property lawyer he consulted with, who he claims told him that unless Sloane was making millions of dollars on OnlyFans, threatening a lawsuit was probably more trouble than it was worth.)

The negative sentiment against these AI-generated creators does not appear to be shared by some in the tech industry, such as Andreessen Horowitz partner Justine Moore, who publicly praised Sloane in an X post, referring to her online presence as “a genius marketing hack.”

Olson is not overly optimistic that AI evangelists will rush to the defense of the creatives whose labor is being exploited. Nor, for that matter, does he believe that the “lizard-brained” commenters rushing to post horny comments on Sloane’s and Skye’s pages particularly care whether they’re real, or who actually crafted the jokes they’re telling in their viral clips.

“To me, we're asking the essential question, does the artist matter?” he says. “And to those 350,000 people that follow Tiffany Sloane, the answer is clearly no. And that’s really demoralizing.”