Washington (United States) (AFP) – The punchline landed just as Julia Jasunas intended — except the American comedian was not the one delivering it. A curvy, blonde AI persona on social media was ripping off a joke about kissing a roommate that Jasunas spent years refining, adding her to a growing chorus of stand-up comedians who say artificial intelligence is enabling the theft of their intellectual labor.
The trend is part of what experts call a mass-scale creative heist facing artists — from painters to musicians — as AI extracts from their work without compensation or attribution, leaving them with little recourse. The account that lifted from Jasunas’s routine, “Aylen Skye,” was one of several sexualized, AI-generated personalities on Instagram and TikTok that AFP found were poaching jokes from real-life comedians. It was unclear who was behind the accounts, some of which sought to drive traffic to subscription-based services known to host pornography.
But the AI plagiarists harvesting her jokes have left Jasunas, a Los Angeles-based artist, pleading with Silicon Valley tech giants to intervene. “This is a huge issue that’s only going to keep getting worse,” Jasunas told AFP, adding that the experience felt “violating.” “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 said. “I think that they have a duty to do that.”
Meta, the owner of Instagram, did not immediately offer a comment. A TikTok spokesperson pointed AFP to its community guidelines, which prohibits creators from sharing content that violates another user’s intellectual property rights. “There used to be a tacit agreement among comedians that ‘we don’t steal other comedian’s jokes,’ and that was sort of enforced within the group,” Michael Smith, a professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University, told AFP. “Now it’s become difficult to enforce in the presence of large language models scraping up all the world’s information.”
Smith said the AI-driven pages threaten livelihoods, siphoning clicks and cash from artists who use social media to build an audience and land gigs. “What happens if we cut out that early part of the career ladder?” he said. “How many great comedians will we lose out on?” The “Aylen Skye” account that hijacked Jasunas’s routine amassed over 230,000 Instagram followers — and a Meta verified checkmark — before it was removed. On TikTok, where the account still exists, the video recycling Jasunas’s joke is one of dozens like it that have garnered tens of thousands of views. The page links to the platform Fanvue, an OnlyFans competitor filled with 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 was not alone. New York-based comedian Olivia Carter has stopped sharing new material on social media, partly because she fears AI bots will regurgitate her sets, spoiling them for live audiences. One copycat AI video stole her joke about asking out a personal trainer — a bit she once delivered on popular TV host Jimmy Fallon’s show. “All the comments were like, ‘Oh, you’re hot,’ and like they thought she was a real person,” Carter told AFP. “That’s actually what made me the most upset and uncomfortable.”
“It’s a very sexualized version of a woman,” Carter said. “Comedy shouldn’t be about that.” George Brett Olson, another California comedian, called the trend “demoralizing to artists” and blasted “the pornification of women.” One bodacious, OnlyFans-linked avatar — “Tiffany Sloane,” with over 370,000 followers — lifted not just his joke, but every element of his performance. “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.”
A complaint Olson posted to Instagram elicited a response from the platform’s head Adam Mosseri, who wrote that banning AI was not “practical” but 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 response was “a big nothing-burger.” He said modern AI is like “a key that would allow you to steal every car that you could see.” “Meta allowed this to happen,” he said. “It’s not inevitable — it’s a choice you’re making.”
© 2024 AFP
