If you’ve been on TikTok recently, chances are Jake Paul has popped up on your For You Page doing something completely wild. Maybe he’s robbing a Sephora in a sequined dress, getting swept away by a tornado dressed like a fairy princess, filming a dramatic “Get Ready With Me” for Thursday Night Football, or even declaring, “I’m gay.” The twist? None of it is real.
On Thursday, October 9, the 28-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer took to X (formerly Twitter) to break down the “method to the madness.” Tagging OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his business partners, Paul revealed that he’s a “proud OpenAI investor” and had “agreed to become the first celebrity NIL cameo user — and from there, things went crazy.”
In just six days, Paul claimed his “cameo has generated 1B+ views.” Wrapping up his post with a shoutout to the developers behind the tech, the boxer wrote, “Congrats to the Sora team on a great product and making the internet fun again.”
For those just tuning into the madness, OpenAI’s new Sora 2 app is essentially TikTok for AI-generated videos. It lets users “opt in” to create cameos — short, consent-based clips where creators can drop your face into any wild scenario imaginable. You film yourself once, verify your identity, and just like that, your digital double is ready for anything. It’s a consent-friendly twist on deepfakes — and Jake Paul is fully embracing it.
The moment Jake Paul opted in, the internet absolutely exploded. Within hours, AI-generated versions of him were everywhere — doing makeup tutorials like a beauty guru, stealing from Taco Bell, and delivering deep monologues about life and love under flawless studio lighting. The edits looked so real that even fans couldn’t tell which clips were genuine, and Paul only stirred the chaos further by posting his own TikToks with the caption, “Which one is AI?”
While fans are loving the chaos, not everyone’s celebrating where this could lead. Some viewers have criticized the viral clips for leaning into tired caricatures and stereotypes — especially the overly glam, hyper-dramatic “AI Jake” edits that blur the line between parody and mockery. Others worry that even though Paul gave his consent, Sora’s cameo feature could open the floodgates for look-alike content that isn’t as harmless.
The concern extends beyond Paul. On October 16, OpenAI removed videos using Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness after his estate labeled them “disrespectful,” leading the company to tighten its policies around depictions of historical and public figures.
Ethics aside, it’s a wild new era for fame. When a digital clone can go viral faster than the real person, who really controls the story — the creator or the platform? Paul’s experiment may be the first major case of a celebrity licensing their face for AI-fueled chaos, but it’s almost certainly not going to be the last.
