AI slop purveyors are stealing comedians’ jokes to create viral Instagram videos of fake comics. And Adam Mosseri, the longtime head of Instagram, says he doesn’t know what to do about it.
As Wired reported last week, a recent trend among AI sloppers is to steal the work of real comedians and repackage it in AI-manipulated clips in which the human performers are replaced by fake AI ones. The AI performers in the videos are often depicted as voluptuous young women and direct viewers to OnlyFans pages, where they’re encouraged to pay for more content.
George Brett Olson, a comedian whose work was ripped off by a thieving AI account with more than 300,000 followers, published a video earlier this month detailing how his work — and even his outfit — were stolen by the AI fake. This prompted a response from Mosseri, who commented that he doesn’t “think it’s practical for us to try and ban Al content from the platform. It’s gonna be harder and harder to identify, and it’s not all bad content (though yes, there is plenty of slop).”
“But we are very invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators, and if an Al creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that,” Mosseri continued. “I’m not sure what it would be, but I’ll make sure to talk to the team and look into it.”
This past weekend, in response to a completely different type of content that was ripped off from a creator and rehashed as AI slop — in this case, a video of a visual artist’s work — Mosseri waded into the AI ripoff trend once again, writing that it’s a “tricky problem” and Instagram is still trying to figure out what to do.
“To be clear, I am very worried about this trend. We are actively working out what to do; it’s just a tricky problem,” Mosseri wrote in a comment on Threads, again in response to Olson. “We already let people make copyright claims against content and take stolen copyrighted material.”
“That’s not enough, though, as I assume many comedians and dancers haven’t gone through the trouble to copyright their material,” he added. “We need a way to help those creatives without letting bad actors make more fake claims (happens all the time unfortunately).”
Given Meta’s stake in the AI race, it’s unlikely that the tech giant will move to rid any of its social media platforms of AI content. And to Mosseri’s point, theft and copyright infringement isn’t exactly a new problem. But while stealing someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is an old problem, AI makes it easer than ever to rip people off with basically zero effort. You no longer have to get on stage and perform a standup set to pilfer from a fellow comic, let alone record it and then post it online; to filch someone’s artwork, you don’t have to actually draw or paint. In other words, the barrier of entry is now amazingly low: all you have to do is set up an AI workflow and hit generate, and you have endless low-effort slop to pump out to the masses. (And if you’re able to convince people that you’re not a thieving sloperator and are instead a hot human woman, you might just rake in some extra cash via OnlyFans in the process.)
It’ll be interesting to see how Meta moves to combat this kind of abuse across its social media platforms, Instagram included — or if it’ll continue to be up to creators to find and report individual instances of abuse piecemeal, and at the mercy of the platform’s tepid moderation efforts.
More on AI ripoffs: Recipe Scammers Are Using an AI-Generated Emily Blunt as a Slop Puppet to Promote Their Garbage
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