Olivia Carter knows she wrote a good joke. It’s identifiably hers, and people must recognize it, because they keep sending her videos of other women telling it.
She’s been sent these videos from a handful of different accounts. They’re always women who look eerily similar — curvy, beautiful, with completely symmetrical faces.
That is, perfect clickbait.
And, of course, they’re AI.
Digital joke thieves
Carter’s joke is expertly crafted:
“One time I asked out my personal trainer, and he said, ‘Sorry I’m not attracted to you,’ and I was like, ‘Well, whose fault is that?’”
Her original version is made all the funnier because of her deadpan stage presence, gentle mimicry of the trainer’s voice, and the inherent (human) vulnerability of the disclosure.
The AI version is missing all of those. In their place, a blonde woman whose athleisure crop top and leggings show her visible abs walks on stage and says the same words. But there are no tone changes, no facial expressions. Even the laughter is fake.
“The first time it happened, I think I didn’t even think about it,” Carter told Straight Arrow this week.
The offending account had blocked her, so Carter couldn’t see it. But a friend reported the post, and it was deleted. But it happened again — more videos, same joke, different AI women.
People recognized it because Carter has told the joke so many times — including on Netflix and the “Tonight Show” — and she grew annoyed as she saw, each time, how many people in the comments thought the AI women were real.
“It wasn’t even upsetting that like, oh someone stole my joke, which is like a thing that comics are very precious about,” she said. “It was more like, oh, people think this is a real person and that she wrote this joke.”
Straight Arrow identified several other comedians whose material had been used to create the fake character, including Sarah Purdum, whose “Daniel Day Lewis” joke has been replicated on the same bot account.
Purdum hadn’t seen the video before Straight Arrow brought it to her attention during reporting for this story. She was pretty surprised.
“There’s aspects of her quote-unquote performance that are comedian-like, but it’s not the same as a comedian telling a joke,” Purdum told Straight Arrow. The character smirks and smiles, “but she still doesn’t get the joke.”
“But she’s just so attractive and looks comedian-esque that, mostly, men are like, ‘this is humorous’,” she said.
‘That’s a bummer’
The jokes chosen by the fake account aren’t random: They all mention dating or what it’s like to be a woman. That’s because the bio links to a Fanvue site for the AI bot. In other words, it appears the jokes are being stolen to advertise porn.
Some of the jokes — like this one about phone screen font sizes — can be found on other accounts. While the account’s bio did not link to any sites, the story linked to an OnlyFans account with a bio “19, and yeah, the body’s real.”
Carter said the success of the bot accounts reflects how the dynamics of social media platforms can emphasize very narrow aesthetics over art and creativity.
“I think Instagram has made a pressure where, like, comedians are now influencers and influencers look a certain way,” she said. “If anything, it’s like, the AI bots just sort of validate that that is something the algorithm rewards.”
The Instagram account that most recently stole her joke has 180,000 followers, while a second one has 240,000 (neither bot account responded to a request for comment, and Instagram categorized each as a “new account” in the DM thread). Carter’s is at 113,000, while Purdum currently has 8,000.
“I just think it’s encouraging an algorithm that pushes forward like, young hot women,” Carter said. “And it’s not really valuing any of the words that are being said, even though they’re my words. So, I mean, that’s a bummer.”
And that bummer could have negative effects on real performers.
“For comedy in general, we’re creating a world where people expect comics to be like AI-generated women’s bodies,” she said. “Like it’s just really bizarre and kind of dystopian.”
Purdum said the bot account’s physical presentation was one of the more obvious AI tells.
“If you are that hot you don’t need to develop a sense of humor,” she laughed. (She was quick to clarify that “there’s plenty of hot female comedians.”)
Purdum said she was initially a little flattered that her joke was considered good enough to steal for a video like this. She said she thought she might be angrier if a human was stealing her material and passing it off as their own onstage. But that’s partly because the fake video fumbles the delivery.
“It’s not delivered well enough,” she said. “If I ever use this clip again, I would easily be able to prove that it’s my joke.”
But because the bot fails to properly replicate Purdum’s punchline, “her loyal fan base, I imagine, would not be real people that I would want my audience made of.”
No escape from social media
Fake beautiful women are, of course, a lucrative business on the internet.
This apparent boom of comedy slop follows a year in which an online scammer went on the record with WIRED to explain that he created his AI bot account (featuring an anti-immigration American Army recruit called “Jessica Foster”) to help pay for his med school exams. Deepfakes are harming influencers’ business models and badly-coded nonconsensual face-swapping apps are creating liability issues. A Reddit post explains one entrepreneur’s attempt to create a service business on top of all this, after surveying “50+ creators that are running AI OnlyFans models as a sidehustle.”
And that industry is now intersecting with the unavoidable truth that, in 2026, comedians have to post videos to sell tickets.
In Carter’s words: “That’s how you get ads for people to come to your shows.” It’s how you get famous — there’s no other way. So these accounts aren’t only stealing material, but are also banking the followers, praise and income that should be directed to the creatives.
Knowing that material can be taken like this, Carter said she is no longer posting new jokes online. Instead, she posts old ones, or crowdwork.
“I think comics have hated posting for a long time, but it doesn’t really seem like we’re in a world where we could have a career without social media,” she said. “But I should be able to put that joke out without, I don’t know, worrying about it getting stolen and sent into some other sort of algorithm in someone else’s feed.”
Purdum is also re-evaluating whether to continue posting online, which she only started doing last summer.
“It’s definitely a catch-22,” she said. She has followed friends’ advice to “put everything out there,” only to have her fear of stolen jokes realized.
“Comedy is not a finite resource but, as a comedian, you know that finding a good joke takes a lot of effort,” she said. She doesn’t expect that AI will be able to create its own comedy — it can’t even really tell stolen jokes well, she added.
Carter said she hopes people report when they see AI-generated standup content, knowing it has likely been stolen. She would also like to see more avenues for accountability on social media platforms. And, she says, people should go to more live shows.
“Jokes are meant to happen in real time,” she said.
Purdum agrees that comedy is best live. “Even just energetically seeing somebody in a room with you,” she said, “makes comedy so much better.”
And she sees the AI bots as behaving eerily similarly to early-career comedians.
“The thing about green comics is … everyone starts trying to emulate the comedians that they like.”
Bot or not, whoever created these deepfakes is, after all, only human.
Round out your reading
- He built his own Flock-style camera to track police. The police didn’t like it.
- Trump’s apparent joke about letting Iran bomb LA and San Diego catches bipartisan condemnation.
- Grandparents are fighting for access to their grandchildren. Here’s what the law says.
- When the ‘victim’ is made with AI, child pornography cases get complicated.
- Fibermaxxing is trending. Here’s what the science says.
