Conan O’Brien hasn’t hosted a late-night show in more than five years. But you wouldn’t know it from certain corners of social media, where a remarkable number of clips of him interviewing attractive young women have been circulating in recent weeks.
The clips show a version of O’Brien that goes well beyond anything viewers would have seen on his real shows—ogling guests, losing the ability to speak, and getting called out for behaving badly.
Some of the encounters take place on the set of his old TBS show. Others, oddly, put him behind Jimmy Fallon‘s desk at The Tonight Show—a chair O’Brien gave up 16 years ago.
It’s all part of a growing crop of AI-generated videos pairing lookalike late-night hosts—most often O’Brien, but also Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Craig Ferguson—with AI-generated models and virtual influencers. Some are one-offs. Others play out like recurring storylines, with the same character and host returning clip after clip.
Neither half of this is entirely new. AI-generated images of impossibly photogenic people have been circulating on social media for years, while late-night hosts have proved useful for ginning up views with AI-generated content. As LateNighter reported this summer, a network of YouTube channels uploaded fake Kimmel monologues while he was on vacation, using his likeness and voice to deliver commentary he never actually said.
What’s newer is the mashup.
Late-night history has plenty of real moments in which a host got flirtatious, distracted, or just plain icky around a guest. These clips take that familiar dynamic and push it to new extremes.
Versions of the format can now be found on Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, with some videos drawing millions of views.
Though the videos aren’t always convincing—some are comically not—the sets, camera angles, and hosts can look close enough to the real thing that, viewed quickly in a social feed, there’s little to immediately give them away.
One of the busiest sources LateNighter found was a Facebook page called Talk Show Stories.
When LateNighter reviewed the page, it had more than 13,000 followers, identified no creator, and did not label its videos as AI-generated. Its About section said little beyond a flirty invitation for visitors to “say hi.”
Mixed in with the fake clips were real ones, like Nicole Scherzinger’s 2011 appearance on Conan, in which she told O’Brien to “focus” after catching him looking at her low-cut dress. Another post featured Jennifer Lawrence telling Stephen Colbert during a 2021 Late Show appearance that she’d been having a lot of sex.
In the same feed, the line between the real clips and the fabricated ones gets blurrier. And if a viewer is drawn in by a real clip, the algorithm will start recommending AI-generated facsimiles.
Some of the AI-generated guests have identities—and audiences—of their own.
“Mila Hayes,” a self-described AI pop star with about 76,000 Instagram followers, credits AI video tools Higgsfield and OpenArt as “creative partners.” Hayes’ YouTube bio promises “the occasional late-night talk show appearance in a world that doesn’t exist.” Clips posted to Hayes’ accounts pair the character with poorly fabricated versions of Fallon, Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert.
“Maya Lanez” is another prolific example. Lanez’s YouTube and Instagram profiles contain dozens of fake talk-show moments with Fallon, O’Brien, and other fictional hosts.
It’s no wonder late night is an effective shortcut for anyone trying to make these characters look more famous. Put an invented personality across from a recognizable host like O’Brien or Fallon and, for a few seconds anyway, it looks like someone who actually gets booked on television.
Others have a more direct commercial incentive.
The social profiles for the AI persona “Lola Melone” direct followers to Fanvue, a subscription platform that has become a kind of OnlyFans for AI-generated characters, where users can pay for “exclusive content” featuring Melone.
That makes the fake talk-show appearances look less like random AI experiments than a form of customer acquisition.
On Sept. 3, Melone’s YouTube account posted a 21-second short purporting to show the character performing a blatantly impossible acrobatic flourish on O’Brien’s TBS show.
“Conan was excited 🙈😅,” the account captioned the video.
The clip has been viewed more than 37 million times. A second upload of the same video, posted three days later, accumulated another 29 million views.
The fake talk-show clips can function as a funnel, drawing huge audiences on social media and steering at least some of that attention toward Melone’s paid content on Fanvue.
For the hosts, the equation is different. Some clips exaggerate familiar parts of their TV personas. Others turn them into something more overtly lecherous, inventing reactions and behavior the real hosts might reasonably object to having attributed to them.
What they can do about it isn’t entirely clear-cut.
Rights governing the unauthorized use of a person’s likeness vary by state, and there is still no broad federal law specifically protecting people from unauthorized AI replicas of their faces and voices. The proposed NO FAKES Act would create such a right, but it remains pending in Congress.
The platforms offer their own forms of recourse. YouTube allows people to request removal of realistic AI-generated versions of their face or voice and has rolled out an experimental tool to help creators find videos using their likeness. TikTok requires realistic AI-generated content to be labeled and prohibits some fabricated depictions of public figures. X bars deceptively shared synthetic media likely to cause harm, while Meta generally labels AI-generated content unless it violates another policy.
Then comes the practical problem: keeping up with it.
As LateNighter found with the fake Kimmel monologues this summer, policing AI-generated celebrity clips can quickly turn into a game of whack-a-mole. Videos get copied, reposted under different accounts, and moved from one platform to another.
Talk Show Stories has since disappeared from Facebook. The videos it posted haven’t. Versions of them remain easy to find on YouTube, TikTok, X, and other accounts on Facebook.
For now, at least, AI late night’s fake booking spree shows no sign of ending.
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