First on LateNighter: For someone who’s been on vacation for more than a month, Jimmy Kimmel appears to have been remarkably busy.
In just the last two weeks, he’s weighed in on Donald Trump dozing off at Lindsey Graham’s funeral. He’s covered Rand Paul’s Senate confrontation with Anthony Fauci. And he’s discussed the Justice Department dropping charges against the former Olympian accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool.
Or at least someone who looks and sounds a lot like Kimmel has.
Dozens of AI-generated videos have used the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host’s face, voice and familiar monologue setup to deliver commentary on current political stories. The clips have been posted across at least half a dozen YouTube channels, packaged with thumbnails designed to match those used by Kimmel’s actual show, whose monologue videos regularly draw millions of views.
The earliest examples identified by LateNighter date to late May, before Kimmel began his annual summer break. But the videos have increased in number over time, continuing to supply new “monologues” while the real Kimmel has been away from television.
The imitation is strongest at the level most useful to YouTube: the thumbnail and opening seconds.
The fakery becomes more apparent on closer inspection. The synthetic Kimmel stands in his usual monologue position but gestures oddly, often emphasizing the wrong words. After about ten seconds, he disappears altogether, leaving the cloned voice to continue over news footage.
The greater tell is the material itself. The clips contain few actual jokes, no audience reaction and none of the conversational rhythm of Kimmel’s actual monologues. Instead, they play more like partisan video essays wearing the visual packaging of Jimmy Kimmel Live!.
The videos are also prone to basic factual errors. One recent clip repeatedly referred to Trump’s former personal lawyer and attorney general nominee Todd Blanche as a senator.
Still, accounts commenting beneath the videos responded as though Kimmel had actually made them.
Under an early July video titled “‘Sleepy Don’ PANICS As Video Of Him Sleeping At NATO Goes Viral,” one wrote, “Bravo, Jimmy Kimmel. It is indeed a strange world when we listen to the comedians, and laugh at the politicians.”
“Love when Kimmel tears Trump apart,” added another.
A third was particularly appreciative: “Thank you Jimmy for taking time out of your vacation to create this video.”
Whether those commenters were genuine viewers or part of the same engagement-farming ecosystem is impossible to know. Either way, the comments help reinforce the fiction that Kimmel had recorded the video.
He had not.
While many of the faux monologues have drawn very small audiences, several have broken through in a major way. A video from last week titled “Trump DOZES OFF at Graham Funeral as MAGA Gets Owned” collected nearly 800,000 views over four days before disappearing alongside several other AI Kimmel uploads posted by the same channel. The channel itself, however, remains online.
The same process played out on a different channel several weeks earlier.
(This AI-generated Kimmel monologue posted to YouTube last week logged nearly 800,000 views before it was pulled down.)
Removing the videos has not severed the connections among the accounts. Their collaborations remain visible, directing returning visitors from channels whose Kimmel uploads have disappeared to other channels still posting the faux monologues.
Nor have the removals slowed the production line. Within hours of the nearly 800,000-view video going down, another faux monologue—“RFK Jr.’s CNN Meltdown EXPOSES MAGA Health Chaos”—appeared on another channel in the network.
Across recent uploads, as many as six YouTube channels have been listed as collaborators. The channels otherwise have little in common. They span at least five languages and cover genres as unrelated as manhwa recaps, Brazilian soccer highlights and Thai military dramas.
That grab bag of languages and subject matter makes the operation look less like a focused political campaign than a content farm chasing whatever recognizable face and provocative headline might generate the next burst of engagement.
It is not clear whether the various channels hosting or collaborating on the videos are under common ownership or are simply using YouTube’s collaboration feature to boost one another’s work, but their overlapping involvement appears to have made the faux-Kimmel clips difficult to eliminate.
The result is a kind of video-level whack-a-mole: individual clips vanish, but the channels associated with them remain available to promote whatever comes next.
It’s also unclear who is responsible for the removals. YouTube may have acted under its policies concerning impersonation or altered content. Disney, ABC or Kimmel’s representatives may have filed takedown notices. Or the uploaders may have deleted the videos themselves after their engagement peaked.
It’s not the first time Kimmel’s likeness has been exploited by content farmers.
During his suspension last year, a series of AI-generated clips purporting to feature Kimmel and his sidekick, Guillermo Rodriguez, circulated on social media. Those videos included a fake Rodriguez pledging his support for Kimmel and an artificial Kimmel telling viewers not to be discouraged by news that his show had been canceled. Neither man had recorded the messages.
Those earlier clips were technically rudimentary, but they still attracted hundreds of thousands of views. The latest videos represent a potentially more durable version of the same phenomenon, as they borrow the look of Kimmel’s official monologue uploads, respond quickly to current events and appear with enough regularity to resemble a shadow version of the real show.
Kimmel is set to return to the air in September and resume delivering monologues he and his team actually wrote and recorded. Until then, YouTube’s synthetic Kimmels appear prepared to keep filling the silence, one disappearing upload at a time.
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