Last week, the stand-up comedian Julia Jasunas was on Instagram when she got a DM from a fellow comic. Did she know, her friend wrote, that a random Instagram influencer had ripped off a joke from her stand-up act?
\n\nInitially, Jasunas was mad but not overly shocked. Plagiarism is not uncommon in the stand-up comedy world, and comics are “really sensitive about it, because there's not a ton of protection against it,” she tells WIRED. “So we all look out for each other.” Then she clicked on the link.
\n\nThe video was of a purported stand-up comic named Aylen Skye, a buxom blond with leonine cheekbones and 250,000 Instagram followers. In the clip, Skye, wearing a crop top and Daisy Dukes, tells a joke about renting out a room in her two-bedroom apartment to a cute guy. To Jasunas’ shock, it was, verbatim, her joke, down to the “ums” and “ahs.”
\n\nWhoever Skye was, she didn’t appear to be a comic; the website she advertised in her video, AylenTV.com, redirected to NSFW content on Fanvue, a subscription-based OnlyFans competitor that markets itself as the “No1 AI monetisation platform for creators.” And not only did she appear to not be a…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/