On Instagram and TikTok, comedians generated in the same way recite real female comedians' sketches word for word. Elyna's account follows the same pattern as most of her videos: it has gathered 110,000 followers.
In a leather corset, miniskirt and garter belt, Elyna, in her twenties, paces the stage of a small French comedy club. The young woman holding the microphone is not a comedian: she is manufactured by artificial intelligence.
The process takes only a few steps. A video of a real female comedian is taken, an artificial intelligence program replaces her body with that of a sexualized virtual figure, and the sequence is then published under the guise of an unknown woman.
This plundering targets almost exclusively women. The stolen jokes are not used only to get laughs: they serve as bait toward erotic sites.
According to a major New York Times investigation, the victims are almost all women, young comedians who talk about sex or dating. Their texts, reproduced identically, feed accounts that have nothing to do with their work.
The disparity is also visible in the comments. The real female comedians are disparaged there for their appearance. The manufactured versions, by contrast, receive only compliments.
Defending oneself remains difficult. A joke is hard to protect, and pursuing an anonymous account is expensive. The authors therefore face obstacles that are both legal and practical.
Platform rules offer only partial protection. Instagram prohibits impersonating an identity, not copying a joke. Once the face and body have been replaced, the text of a sketch can circulate without the original comedian being formally imitated.
The result is a hijacking that is visible and yet hard to stop: avatars build an audience by reciting other people's work, while the women whose sketches were taken see their image degraded and their material used as a storefront for erotic content.