Comics Say AI Accounts Are Swiping Their Sets to Sell OnlyFans

The OnlyFans page tied to an Instagram account allegedly run by Tiffany Sloane has a bio that reads, "19, and yeah, the body's real." But it seems the comedy on her Instagram feed is not real. Or at least, not hers.

Olivia Carter found that out the hard way. Her personal-trainer bit has aired on Netflix and "The Tonight Show," and people kept sending her AI-altered copies of it. Fellow comic Sarah Purdum's Daniel Day-Lewis joke turned up on the same account, which had roughly 180,000 followers and a bio sending people to Fanvue, a site that allows AI performers (if they disclose it).

Then there's George Brett Olson, who posted a side-by-side of his own set and a Tiffany Sloane clip with a similar outfit and the same gesture. He says Instagram doesn't give people a way to report this, though plenty have tried. His other complaint is that whoever stole his joke got the punchline wrong. He might be more annoyed at that than the joke being stolen to begin with.

The account is growing fast. Its first post went up September 11. By October 5 it had 124 posts and about 375,000 followers, with millions of views, according to investor Justine Moore of Andreessen Horowitz. The clips are cut to look like short live-comedy videos and carry a watermark with the handle. The bio says "actress," the OnlyFans link sits in the highlights, and nothing says the sets are AI-generated or borrowed.

Moore, for her part, had no complaints. She called it "a genius OnlyFans marketing hack" and said she'd guessed at least some of these videos were AI creations built from real footage. She never called it a scam. She admired the strategy.

The strategy runs on a loophole. OnlyFans requires AI content to belong to a verified creator, clearly feature that creator, and carry an AI label. The terms taking effect November 1 reinforce that. A fully synthetic performer doesn't fit the framework, since there's no real creator for the content to belong to. 

Critics say the whole thing is just the AI industry's business model in miniature. Substack writer Michel de Cryptadamus called it "deranged" that a venture capitalist is explaining that fooling people with fake influencers is the technology's best use. A Microsoft scientist, Brent Hecht, wrote in a 2023 internal memo that training AI on scraped work was "the largest theft of labor in human history." The comedians involved are experiencing that firsthand.

Carter says the stolen jokes aren't what bothers her most. She thinks Instagram has pushed comedians to act like influencers, and influencers to look a certain way, so the bots are just giving the algorithm what it wants. She's stopped posting new jokes online.

It's grim, and also a little ridiculous. Real creators are already battling deepfake impersonators who steal their faces to run scams. Now fake women are lifting real comics' material to sell access to more fake women. Where does it go from here?