AI Bots are stealing comedian jokes

0:00 Hello, I'm Johnny Mac with your daily comedy news. The headline, AI-generated hot girls are ripping off comedians to boost their horny content. This is just what women comedians need right now, right? All right, the story. Last week, stand-up comedian Julia Jasunas was on Instagram when she got a DM from a fellow comic. Did she know that a random Instagram influencer had ripped off a joke from her stand-up act? Julia clicked on the link. The video depicted a woman wearing a crop top and Daisy Dukes, says Wired, and told a joke about renting a room in her two-bedroom apartment. It was verbatim, the same joke even down to the ums and ahs. If you were to click through, you would have gone to a not-safe-for-work website. As soon as told Wired, you look at any female comics comic sections and you see all these men berating her, objectifying her body, saying she's not funny or the joke is bad. But on this video, all the comments were positive, so she said that's how I knew she was fake. It's one thing to have your joke stolen, it's another to funnel your work into something so sexualized for someone else's profit.

1:05 She reported the video to Meta and said they didn't seem to care. Wired has identified eight comics whose videos have been replicated by scantily clad AI-generated women. All of the videos are copies of already successful viral stand-up clips, except the AI-generated counterparts are playing to bigger audiences with better lighting. I could use better lighting. Better sound and more skin-tight outfits. Flirty, clearly AI-generated late-night interviews with hosts like Conan and Camel. Wow. Mandy Martino said AI is evolving very fast and we need rules to protect creators before this becomes a bigger issue. It's not just about a joke being stolen. It's about this being a change that we need to get ahead of. And Instagram saying this isn't a problem is the scariest part.

1:46 On October 3rd, comedian George Brett Olson posted a video called AI stole my joke, showing a side by side comparison of his stand up about how Republicans ignore the risks of AI. That's funny on all sorts of levels. In both clips, the comics are standing in front of identical backdrops and wearing similar salmon shirts and khaki shorts. Only the punchline, which features an expletive in Olsen's version, is different. He told Wired, I was in shock. I just thought it was so weird to see people openly stealing in real time. I couldn't believe it. This is my intellectual property. I created it. Not only did this person or whatever steal it, they stole my likeness, too. According to Wired, Olsen tagged Instagram head Adam Mosseri. Mosseri responded by saying he didn't think it was, quote, practical for us to try to ban AI content. And that Meta was, quote, very invested in striving to drive more traffic to original content creators. And if an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that.

2:42 This is a nightmare for comedians. Wow. A spokesperson for Wired said, our policies are pretty clear around this stuff, and Adam's comment speaks for itself. Deadline also wrote about this. They spoke with comedian Natalie Cuomo, who said she's had jokes ripped off on Instagram somewhere between seven and ten times. The Deadline piece says, seeing a digitally created shell of a person with her own tattoos performing her material has felt, quote, violating and super upsetting. At first, she said the AI seemed so obviously fake she could laugh at it. Quote, then I realized people thought she was real and that was her joke and that's what bothered me. Deadline writes, as Cuomo sees it, the combination of objectively funny and already viral comedic content with a super sexual eye-catching AI persona. is the perfect recipe for bad actors to quickly grow online accounts. The Hollywood Reporter also got in on this. They also quoted Instagram chief Adam Mosseri in their version of the quote, I don't think it's practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform. It's going to be harder and harder to identify, and it's not all bad content, though yes, there is plenty of slop, but we are very interested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators, and if an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that. I'm not sure what they would be, But I'll make sure to talk to the team and look into it. By the way, anybody heard from Sebastian Maniscalco? How much time does he need for that project that he's working on? I guess it takes longer than I thought. Forty years after Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, and Robin Williams headlined the original comic relief, it is back tonight at New York's Carnegie Hall. John Oliver is your host. It is the return of the

4:15 annual Comic Relief Live benefit. If you were younger, back in the day, this was like, I don't know, Live Aid for Comedians. It would be an HBO thing every year, and it was a BFD, as they say. Some of the performers include Roy Wood Jr., Josh Johnson, Zorna Gorg, Mary Beth Maroon. The not-so-canceled Aziz Ansari is getting another Netflix special. It'll be out sometime next year. It'll be the not-so-canceled comedian's seventh stand-up special, his fifth for Netflix. He will tape it in New Jersey. Maybe I should go at the State Theater on October 29th. Aziz Ansari said, I'm so excited to provide a quote for another press release about one of my projects. If anyone is reading me on the headline, please let me know. I'm excited about this special, and I believe it's my best one.

4:58 If you're bored, Google the phrase Aziz Ansari cancelled. It looks like Shane Gillis escaped the week without being canceled. Late Nighter has the SNL ratings from the October 10th episode. It averaged 4.4 million total viewers and 1.1 million viewers in the 18 to 49s. That was up 1% in total viewers and 4% in the demo. When I last looked at the numbers on Thursday afternoon, it was already up to 3.2 million views for that monologue. Kathy Griffin got involved in this. She told Page Six, I think as a comic, I'm always going to fight for the First Amendment and his right, Shane, to say it. And yet I don't have to like it. So I defend his right to say it. And I also defend everyone else's right to think less of him. There are a lot of hacks who are doing very well and they come from TikTok or the podcast world. He's not the only guy to break out from Joe Rogan's influence. There are so many. They all look alike to me. They all look like they can't get laid. They all sound alike to me. They all tell the same jokes. And they tell these jokes about women that are like from 100 years ago, like women should be in the kitchen and shut up and all this other stuff. Joe Rogan commented on Shane. He talked about the word police and called Shane a great guy. Here's Joe Rogan.

6:07 When you see a guy joking around about a woman dressing like a whore, you connect it to horrible thoughts, like horrible actions, like real, actual evil men that actually. Because there's. A lot of men that genuinely hate women. Shane Gillis is not one of them. Right. And he's a great guy. It's just a joke. But for some people, those words. And then you see the word police people, which is hilarious. We need to stop using that word. We're still using the word whore. You're not? Yeah. It's great. It's a great word. It's a great word. Yeah. It's a great word for also yourself. Michael Che went on the Today Show to promote his new special. Correspondent Laura Jarrett asked him about Shane Gillis.

6:49 Chase said, that's comedy. It's like you think it's funny and some people don't. Here's Michael Che telling his version. So let's talk about what's going on at SNL because we couldn't help but notice your Instagram this week making a reference to a certain someone's opening monologue. Oh, no. You said, thanks a lot, Shane. Referencing, of course, Shane Gillis. You even had to bleep that out. Well, there was the eye roll emoji. But in all seriousness, how are you thinking about what happened this week with Shane's opening monologue? You've seen the pushback. No, again, that's comedy. It's like you think it's funny and then some people don't. Did you laugh at what he said? I was at cue cards.

7:31 Actually thinking about what I was going to say that was going to make people upset. So I wasn't really, I didn't even see it till like the next day. And you thought? I didn't think about it, honestly. I think it just didn't, it just was. Like, If you if you had seen it ahead of time, because the writers get to see the opening monologue right ahead of time, they get to see the drafts. I assume if you're not working, it's there's so much going on. You really it's really hard to really hard to see what everyone's doing, you know, especially like if like for me, I'm not. what they call good at my job. So I don't pay attention to that.

8:12 I don't know about that. You've been on the Weekend Update desk for. A long time. Yeah, but that's different. That's why I focus on Update because it's not something that I'm natural at. So I got to really, really work at it. I got to study it. Most of your fans love the joke swap with your buddy Colin. You talk to both of my fans? All your fans. They love the joke swap, but the jokes can go hard. Yeah, that's why, you know, that's why I can't criticize anybody. Then, of course, this being 2026, someone on the Internet commented on Che's comment. That person wrote, I'm going to use the word pussycat here. You know what I'm saying, right? Pussycat. You know what I'm saying? OK, let's try and keep it clean. Michael Che posted a screen grab of an exchange with one fan. That fan wrote such a pussycat for staying neutral. Stand up for women, you piece of crap.

9:02 Michael Che responded, I think your use of the word pussycat As a derogatory word is disrespectful and problematic, and I'm not going to stand up for it, you sexist effing pig. How's that? I am dressed in 49ers garb because the 49ers are the Monday night football game. We have the Knicks tomorrow. It's a good week for sports. I did watch the Norm Macdonald thing. I really enjoyed it. But boy, it is long. Part of me is I need to watch a bunch of things when I watch TV, and I don't like watching long things. So I was enjoying Norm, but at some point I'm like, how long is this? It's two hours and change. Maybe if it were even two episodes, I probably would have watched both episodes, but I would have felt like I watched two things, not one long thing, if that makes any sense at all.

9:43 And it probably doesn't. It's just how my brain works. So I liked it a lot, but a little long. I also want to say I didn't forget about the Scrubs recaps. I've been super busy. As I speak to you right now, I have all four episodes of the new season sitting on the it's not a DVR anymore. It's a DVR. It's YouTube TV. Yeah, it's a DVR. Anyway, they're all sitting there. I just need to find time to watch them. And then the Scrubs recap episodes will return. I didn't forget. Just been so busy. Looks like Carrot Top will be back on stage tonight. Last Thursday, tickets went on sale for daily shows starting tonight at the Luxor. Carrot Top Scott Thompson was hospitalized on September 18th after he was discovered unconscious near the pool in his backyard following a welfare check. Hope everything is okay with Carrot Top. This is really cool from the National Comedy Center. They announced the acquisition of one of the most significant collections of original I Love Lucy production material to merge in decades. including hundreds of rare, previously unseen behind-the-scenes photos, Lucy and Desi's personally owned 35mm prints of the series, wow, that's awesome, and a rare original script draft representing the earliest known revisions to the formative I Love Lucy pilot episode. The script reveals the creative groundwork for the series when it was still titled The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show, and the central characters were named Lucy and Larry Lopez.

10:59 That's interesting. I Love Lucy premiered on CBS October 15, 1951, with Lucy and Desi as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. I imagine you would know, not the Lopez family. In 2023, Variety named I Love Lucy the number one greatest television show of all time. That is your comedy news for today. Go Niners! See you tomorrow.