The story behind the cartoon
WIRED's investigation, published October 16, identified eight stand-up comedians whose viral clips had been rebuilt by AI-generated women. The copies keep the original routine almost word for word — down to the ums and uhs — and upgrade everything around it: the same staging, sometimes the same outfit in a more revealing cut, better lighting, cleaner sound, and a performer who does not exist.
The copies are outdrawing the originals. Tiffany Sloane, an AI performer who began posting in September, passed 375,000 Instagram followers within weeks, and one of her clips topped 7 million views in under two weeks. Aylen Skye amassed about 250,000 followers performing Julia Jasunas's jokes, while her website funneled viewers to Fanvue, an OnlyFans rival that markets itself to AI creators. Olivia Carter's copycat account had 214,000 followers to Carter's 117,000.
The platform's rules protect the pipeline. Jasunas reported the copied video to Meta as impersonation and was told it violated nothing: the fake was not pretending to be her, only presenting her joke as its own. Comedian George Brett Olson found Sloane performing his material in a copy of his own stage outfit — salmon shirt, khaki shorts — and got an apology and a deletion only after calling her out publicly. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said the platform will examine its response, but AI-generated content itself is not banned.
The joke in Zimbo's cartoon is the machine doing openly what the accounts do quietly: a Joke Extractor bolted down backstage, draining a working comic's setups, observations, punchlines, and callbacks through a hose and piping them into four phones, where four smiling performers turn them into hearts and subscribers. Years of open mics go in one end. The crowd was never the comedian's to keep — he just wrote everything it laughs at.
THE CHIP SALESMAN BUYS IN
AI MADE SEVEN COMPANIES RICH. THE OTHER 493 GOT THE BILL.
THE WRONG DOOR.
THE META FUNNEL.