A new account on TikTok has recently been blowing up for its larger than life food skits, featuring seemingly impossible mountains of food. The twist? All of the account’s videos seem like they are made with AI — and to make matters worse, the premise of the AI videos are reportedly directly stolen from a real food content creator.
The original creator, Lyles (@lifewithlyles on TikTok), has been consistently posting humorous skits on TikTok since early 2021, garnering over 67K followers on the platform in over five years. His most viral videos are his “application” videos, which feature Lyles faux-submitting his application to various food chains by demonstrating his ability to make the company’s food, often while poking fun at some of the shortcomings of the chain’s product, whether it’s Pizza Hut’s sauce-to-cheese ratio or Jersey Mike’s drowning their sandwiches in lettuce, tomato, and onion.
Meanwhile, the reportedly AI account, YoooRyan (@yoooryan_ on TikTok), posted its first video on August 26 of this year. The video — “application to work at Jersey Mike’s” — has a strikingly similar look to a video from Lyles posted on August 24.
Even more than replicating the text overlay word for word, the YoooRyan account also put down the ingredients on the sandwich bun in the same order as Lyles did in his video. The style of the videos are also very similar, with YoooRyan building the food in complete silence and ending the video with a head nod, which Lyles does to signal a job well done. YoooRyan even wears the same outfit as Lyles did in his original Jersey Mike’s video.
Somehow, the reportedly AI account has gained nearly ten times the amount of followers as Lyles’ in just two weeks, garnering over 600K TikTok users.
This is not the only videos of Lyles’ and YoooRyan that are similar. For example, in Lyles’ video of his application to work at Crumbl, which attracted 5.7 million views since it was posted on July 26, he strikes a giant lump of frosting on a sugar cookie before pouring an obscene amount of sugar on it and topping the sugar-loading cookie with colorful mini marshmallows. The result is clearly communicating a running joke about the high-sugar content of Crumbl’s cookies in a way that is already exaggerated.
However, in YoooRyan’s video of the same idea, posted on August 31 — an application to Crumbl — he pipes a perfect, giant swirl of frosting onto an equally-large cookie, drizzles caramel, and chocolate sauce onto the tower of frosting, then tops the cookie with M&Ms, brownie chunks, whole Oreo cookies, and Oreo cookie crumble, sugar pearls, squares of fudge and brookies, gummies, mini marshmallows, another generous drizzle of butterscotch sauce and chocolate sauce, rainbow sprinkles, and a final dusting of powdered sugar.
The most outrageous part of this video isn’t the obscene and unrealistic amount of toppings — it’s the fact that the video has 12.1 million views, more than twice the amount of the original creator’s video.
There are a few subtle ways to tell that the video is likely AI, such as garbled text on clothing and food labels, alongside inaccurate logos. Also, in the age of AI, if something looks too perfect to be true, it’s probably not real.
Unfortunately, while these indicators can help determine if something is artificial or not, if you’re not actively looking out for warnings of AI-generated content, it can be difficult to spot the difference between real and fake.
In the case of YoooRyan’s videos, comments noticing that he might be AI didn’t start surfacing across his videos until three or four days after his first video was posted, specifically filling the comments of his Subway application video. YoooRyan has not responded to any comments on any of his videos, whether they allege AI usage or not, and he only reacts to a couple of comments on each of his videos that clearly enjoy his content. He does not seem to have any other social media accounts.
While YoooRyan has not addressed any AI allegations, there is a possibility that the creator is not completely AI-generated — he could be a real person putting his own face over AI-generated content.
To stop AI accounts from stealing ideas and taking away attention from real food creators, reporting the account — while sometimes effective — is not enough, as TikTok does not have an outright ban of AI-generated content. It’s best to block any AI accounts and seek out the same content from the original source that features a real human.
Blocking accounts you suspect to be AI on TikTok, even if you don’t watch the content in the first place, prevents the AI account from profiting off of a real person’s ideas. I also recommend showing some love to @lifewithlyles if you enjoy food-related skits to show your support for real food creators.
AI can be difficult to spot, especially in niches of TikTok where you would least expect to be infiltrated by artificial content, so make sure to be vigilant and question any videos that look a little too perfect. No matter how entertaining some AI content may be, a human creator on TikTok or Instagram can always provide the same level of entertainment for you.