AI avatars lift comedians' jokes to drive OnlyFans traffic

A joke that Olga Namer, a New York stand-up, says took her nine years to land drew about 520,000 views when she posted it herself. An AI-generated version of the same bit, fronted by a photorealistic woman who is not her, reached nearly eight million.

Namer is one of three comedians, alongside Natalie Cuomo and Olivia Carter, profiled by The New York Times and Deadline, who say AI avatar accounts have been running their stand-up sets through generative tools, swapping in a different body, and reposting the material to Instagram as free-feeder content for paid OnlyFans and Fanvue pages. Cuomo says her jokes have been ripped on Instagram somewhere between seven and 10 times; one avatar copy even reproduced her own tattoos. Seeing it, she said, has felt 'violating and super upsetting.'

Carter's example is that clean. An Instagram account with 214,000 followers reposted her personal-trainer joke nearly word for word, and reached more people than Carter did. The avatar accounts frequently block the comics they are copying, so the stolen posts are not even visible to the people whose sets have been lifted.

The comedians have reported the accounts to Meta. Namer went further, asking a lawyer friend to file a complaint in an attempt to track down the email address behind one of the offending accounts; the account was taken down before that line of inquiry produced anything useful, and she was back at square one.