Artificial intelligence accounts are stealing the work of American stand-up comedians, repackaging their jokes through sexualised fake personas, and Silicon Valley platforms are refusing to stop it, according to reporting by IOL published on 11 November 2026.
The story centers on Los Angeles comedian Julia Jasunas, who spent years refining a joke about kissing a roommate, only to watch a blonde, curvy AI avatar called Aylen Skye deliver it on Instagram and TikTok. The account amassed more than 230,000 followers and even carried a Meta verified checkmark before it was removed from Instagram. On TikTok it still exists, and the stolen video has drawn tens of thousands of views.
Extraction Without Consent Is the Business Model
Let us name this plainly. What AFP journalists uncovered, and what Yahoo News carried in its international report, is a mass-scale creative heist. Large language models scrape the world's art, music and comedy, and then corporations monetise it without paying a cent to the people who made it. The Aylen Skye account funnels followers toward Fanvue, a subscription platform filled with adult content from AI models. Jasunas said the discovery felt violating.
Any kind of social media platform has the technology and has the power and has the money to put into more stringent regulations on AI, Jasunas told AFP. I think that they have the duty to do that.
Meta offered no comment. TikTok pointed to community guidelines that prohibit intellectual property violations, a gesture that has stopped nothing.
Why South African Artists Should Care
This is not an American problem. It is a preview of what awaits every working artist in Mzansi, and history tells us who will be hit hardest.
Our creative economy has always been built on Black labour and white profit. Under apartheid, Black musicians recorded for labels that owned their masters and paid them session fees while the companies grew rich. Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela had to leave the country before the industry would even treat them as owners of their own voices. Solomon Linda wrote The Lion Sleeps Tonight and died in poverty while American publishers made millions from it. That theft was done with contracts and lawyers. This theft is done with code, and it moves faster.
Stand-up comedy in South Africa has always been more than entertainment. From the township stages that produced the late greats to the current generation of Black comedians selling out arenas, comedy has been where we tell the truth about this country when the newspapers would not. If a machine in California can swallow a Soweto comedian's set and regurgitate it through a fake white avatar with 200,000 followers, then the ladder that Black artists climb is being sawed off at the bottom.
Michael Smith, a professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University, put the danger in direct terms. He told AFP there used to be a tacit agreement among comedians that they do not steal each other's jokes, an agreement enforced within the community. Large language models have made that agreement impossible to enforce.
What happens if we cut out that early part of the career ladder? Smith asked. How many great comedians will we lose out on?
Meta's Answer: A Shrug
California comedian George Brett Olson discovered an OnlyFans-linked avatar called Tiffany Sloane, with more than 370,000 followers, performing his joke on the stage he had performed on, wearing the same outfit he had worn, and butchering the punchline. He complained publicly, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, responded that banning AI was not practical and that Meta was very invested in driving traffic to original 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 am not sure what it would be.
Olson called the response a big nothing-burger and said Meta allowed this to happen. It is not inevitable, he told MagnifyPost in its syndicated report, it is a choice you are making.
That choice is the whole story. These are not neutral tools. They are machines built by the same Western corporations that have always treated African and diaspora creativity as a free resource to mine, from the colonial looting of our art and artefacts to the unpaid sampling of Black music that built entire American industries. Now the extraction is automated. Now it comes for the joke you told last night in Braamfontein.
The Sexualised Avatar Is Not an Accident
New York comedian Olivia Carter, whose joke about asking out a personal trainer was lifted by an AI account after she performed it on Jimmy Fallon's show, has stopped posting new material online, The Manila Times reported. She said the fake persona was a very sexualised version of a woman, and that comedy should not be about that.
Jasunas said it plainly: You are funnelling my intellectual property into some sexual thing for profit, and that grossed me out.
Women built this industry under conditions men never faced, and now machines are turning their stolen work into soft pornography for clicks. Black women artists, already fighting for fair pay in a sector that undervalues them, face a double dispossession.
What Must Happen Next
Olson compared modern AI to a key that would allow you to steal every car you could see. The platforms hold the key, and they have chosen not to turn the lock.
For South Africa, the lesson is to legislate before the flood arrives. Our performers' rights protections must be updated to name AI scraping explicitly. Our broadcasters and streaming platforms must pay for original Black content and refuse to host synthetic imitators. And the artists themselves should hold back material from platforms that profit from their theft.
The punchline that landed for Jasunas was hers. Nobody handed it to a machine. The machine took it, and a company put a blue tick on the thief.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do AI accounts steal comedians' jokes?
Large language models scrape publicly posted material, and operators feed it to AI-generated personas that perform the jokes as video content, often to drive followers toward paid subscription services.
What did Meta say about the stolen joke accounts?
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said banning AI was not practical and that Meta was unsure what could be done about accounts ripping off content wholesale.
Which comedians have been affected?
AFP found that Los Angeles comedian Julia Jasunas, New York comedian Olivia Carter and California comedian George Brett Olson all had their material copied by AI-generated accounts.