‘Comedians’ Are Stealing Jokes to Sell OnlyFans Subscriptions
Somewhere on Instagram, a working comic’s best bit is being delivered by a woman who doesn’t exist. Accounts steering viewers to OnlyFans and Fanvue pages are stealing real stand-up sets, running them through AI and swapping in a different body, then posting the results as free advertising for paid subscriptions. The comedians who recognize their material are furious, but at least one venture capitalist is delighted.
That investor, Justine Moore of Andreessen Horowitz’s consumer AI team, called the tactic “a genius OnlyFans marketing hack” after spotting an account named Tiffany Sloane (@tiffany.bbyx). She didn’t call it a scam. She applauded the growth. The account’s first post dates to September 11, and by October 5 it had 124 posts and roughly 375,000 followers, with millions of views, according to Moore. The clips mimic short live-comedy videos and carry a watermark with the handle. According to the account bio, the featured person is an actress. The link to an OnlyFans can be found in the highlights, and nothing says the sets are AI-generated…or that they are stolen.
But the comedians have noticed. Olivia Carter, whose personal-trainer bit has aired on Netflix and “The Tonight Show,” revealed that people kept sending her AI copies of it. At first she couldn’t even watch the stolen version because the bot account had blocked her. The same bot account also seems to have a Daniel Day-Lewis joke by comic Sarah Purdum, and it had about 180,000 followers and a bio pointing to Fanvue, a site that permits disclosed AI creators. A second account’s story link led to an OnlyFans page whose bio reads “19, and yeah, the body’s real,” the same page linked from Tiffany Sloane’s highlights.
Comic George Brett Olson posted a side-by-side on Threads under the caption “AI stole my joke and outfit.” He showed his own video next to a Tiffany Sloane clip with matching gestures and look. He said Instagram offers no real way to report it, though plenty of people tried.
While this may work for now, OnlyFans has begun cracking down on AI use, especially undisclosed AI usage. The platform requires AI content to belong to a verified creator, clearly feature that creator, and be identifiable as AI, with the hashtag #ai as the easy fix. The terms taking effect November 1 reinforce these rules. A wholly AI-created performer doesn’t fall within OnlyFans framework, since there is no verified creator for the content to belong to. Since the funnel starts on Instagram, where no one is checking, the rules are a little fuzzy. But it is working for now.
And many people are not happy about it, especially Moore’s approval. Substack writer Michel de Cryptadamus called it “deranged” that anyone, let alone a venture capitalist, is explaining that the best use of AI is deceiving the public with fake influencers. But no one should be surprised since AI was essentially trained on stolen content. A Microsoft applied-science director, Brent Hecht, wrote in a 2023 internal memo, since unsealed in the New York Times’ copyright case, that training on scraped material was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” The comedian accounts are a smaller, cruder version of the same business model.
Carter’s complaint goes past the theft. She sees it as a bigger problem: Instagram pressures comedians to become influencers, influencers to look a certain way, and the bots simply confirm what the algorithm rewards. The result, she said, is that “we’re creating a world where people expect comics to be like AI-generated women’s bodies,” which she called “kind of dystopian.” She no longer posts new jokes on social media.
OnlyFans already has creators fending off deepfake impersonators who steal their faces to run scams. Now people are creating fake women and are borrowing working comics’ labor to sell access to still more fake women. The algorithm is cheering, and comedians and creators are left trying to decide how to move forward.