Why Are Stand-ups Complaining About AI Characters?

Adam Mosseri says stand-ups are already complaining that their bits get stolen and then delivered by AI characters. Rights management for jokes is not a working system, and Instagram will not censor a post just for repeating the same joke. Treating the copies as unoriginal content is the path on the table, so Instagram can still reward the original creators.

Many of the characters run on scripts that pull the most viral Reels from the past couple of months or the past year and recreate them. Instagram does not rank AI-generated character accounts differently from human accounts when both are entertaining in a similar way. Accounts built as AI-generated characters now have to label themselves, because people should know whether they are looking at something real or not real.

Telling the difference keeps getting harder as the models get better. Instagram has technology that tries to detect AI, but automatic labels are risky: any classifier has false positives, and marking a real creator as an AI creator by mistake makes a lot of people angry. A carousel was classified as AI content, probably because of metadata from a tool, and the person who posted it took the flag as a compliment. Hate shows up in DMs whenever the labels go wrong. The balance is detection plus incentives for accounts to add the label themselves.