In brief: An Instagram account called Tiffany Sloane drew about 375,000 followers in under a month with AI-generated stand-up clips that comedians say copied their jokes, and pointed viewers to an OnlyFans page; by Oct. 7 its posts had been taken down, Garbage Day reported.
Most comedians spend years building a following one open mic at a time. “Tiffany Sloane” did it in about three weeks, and comics say she did it with their material.
The Instagram account, @tiffany.bbyx, posted its first clip on Sept. 11, Gizmodo reported. By Oct. 5 it had about 375,000 followers and 124 posts. The clips look like short live stand-up sets, with a woman at a mic in front of a crowd. Neither the woman nor the crowd appears to be real. One clip passed 7 million views in under two weeks, according to Kotaku.
‘A genius OnlyFans marketing hack’
The account went from viral to infamous on the evening of Oct. 3, when Justine Moore, a partner on Andreessen Horowitz’s consumer AI team, posted a compilation of its clips:
I think I stumbled on a genius OnlyFans marketing hack.
This AI comedian (“Tiffany Sloane”) started posting 3 weeks ago and is blowing up – 360k followers and millions of views.
Her bio links to what appears to be a real woman’s OF profile..using her AI persona for marketing.
View this post on X
According to Gizmodo, the OnlyFans link sat in the account’s Instagram highlights rather than the bio, which described the account holder as an actress. Nothing on the profile said the sets were AI-generated or borrowed. Moore later wrote that she “figured at least some of these were video-to-video” creations.
‘AI stole my joke and outfit’
Comedian George Brett Olson had already noticed. On Oct. 3 he posted a video comparing one of Sloane’s jokes with his own set, Kotaku reported. On Threads he posted side-by-side snapshots in which he and the AI woman wear similar outfits and make the same gesture, under the line “AI stole my joke and outfit,” Gizmodo reported. He added that “you can’t report this. A bunch of people tried,” and finished with a working comic’s real grievance: “Also they screwed up my punchline.”
Comedian Olivia Carter, whose personal-trainer bit has also been on Netflix and The Tonight Show, told Straight Arrow News reporter Rosie Thomas that she kept getting sent AI copies of it, Gizmodo reported. Her bigger worry was what the algorithm rewards. “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.”
Instagram, OnlyFans and the fine print
Instagram head Adam Mosseri commented on Olson’s video, Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick reported Oct. 7: “I don’t think it’s practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform,” but “if an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that.” Broderick reported that the account now carries an “AI-generated profile” label and that its posts have been taken down. Know Your Meme also logged that the page had deleted all its content after the backlash.
The OnlyFans side is murkier. OnlyFans’ terms say AI-generated content “must be clearly and conspicuously captioned as AI Generated Content with a signifier such as #ai, or #AIGenerated,” and Gizmodo notes that the rules expect such content to belong to, and feature, a verified creator. Broderick wrote that the OnlyFans account linked from Sloane’s profile is verified, “So there is some kind of real person behind all of this,” and estimated from public like counts that it makes “a couple hundred dollars a month at most.”
Gizmodo’s Oct. 6 report by Kyle Torpey and Kotaku’s Oct. 5 piece by Zack Zwiezen document the follower counts and Olson’s comparison. Garbage Day traced several earlier Tiffany Sloane-branded accounts on TikTok and YouTube that it called “failed experiments.” Who runs the account has not been publicly identified, and we have not seen the OnlyFans page’s content. All numbers are as reported by those outlets.
So the act ran about four weeks, the jokes went back to their owners, and the only thing still up, per Garbage Day, is the OnlyFans link. A tough room.
Sources:
- Gizmodo, “AI Comedians Are Stealing Jokes on Instagram to Sell OnlyFans Subscriptions” (Oct. 6)
- Kotaku, “Viral AI-Generated Comedian Steals Jokes And Is Rewarded With Millions Of Views” (Oct. 5)
- Garbage Day, “‘A genius OnlyFans marketing hack’” (Oct. 7)
- Know Your Meme, “Tiffany Sloane (AI Comedian)” (updated Oct. 8)
- Justine Moore on X (Oct. 3)
- OnlyFans Terms of Use