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.

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