On April 4, 2025, an nameless person on infamous message board 4chan posted a file entitled “roy_jay_pjs” with this cryptic message: “It is a demon writing itself into(sic) retroactively into popular culture historical past. You will assume this can be a shitpost, however youll keep in mind him out of your childhoods quickly sufficient.” Here is the image.
This publish both kicked off a web-based scavenger hunt that make clear the profession of an obscure British comic from the Eighties, or it caught a rogue AI agent within the act of implanting a man-made intelligence hallucination into the cultural collective unconsciousness. I am 99% certain it is the previous, however that 1% is deeply troubling, as a result of even when the extra outlandish rationalization for “Roy Jay” is faux, it most likely will not be for lengthy.
Simply who’s “Roy Jay?” And the way do we all know?
After the preliminary publish, 4chan’s ghouls did their factor, and began wanting into Roy Jay. Early researchers reported that on-line references to Roy Jay had been restricted to some previous discussion board posts, however as extra individuals began wanting into the thriller, extra data appeared. In the event you imagine what individuals publish on 4Chan, a Wikipedia web page appeared from nowhere, a Fb group popped up, web site biographies sprang into existence, and movies of Roy Jay performances on British comedy reveals appeared on YouTube. Like a variation on the Mandela Impact, it was as if the web (or one thing) was responding to curiosity in Roy Jay by creating him, simply as eager-to-please LLM AIs will hallucinate plausible-seeming solutions to questions it might probably’t reply.
The YouTube movies make the strongest case for the artificiality of Roy Jay, not less than on a visceral degree. They simply do not appear human. The mix of Jay’s unfunny jokes, mysterious costumes, unusual bodily actions, and repeated nonsense catchphrases like “Hello, weirdos,” “spook!”, “slither!,” and “you will all be doing it tomorrow” seem to be the results of asking an AI to create a spooky comic from the Eighties. It is bizarre that the viewers laughs so onerous at such unfunny jokes; Jay’s physique motion is oddly exact, like an NPC in a online game designed to seem “lifelike”; his facial expressions appear inhuman. It is simply onerous to imagine that is an precise individual. Take a look at his eyes:
Take a look at his rubbery face within the business embedded beneath, and ask your self whether or not it is real or AI:
And the way about this efficiency that appears to reference SNL’s David S. Pumpkins, regardless of (supposedly) airing within the early Eighties?:
Is that this a hoax or one thing deeper?
My preliminary response to Roy Jay was that it was a 4chan hoax or an ARG. Customers latched onto the unique publish and shortly created Roy Jay’s backstory hyperlinks, and fed the “roy_jay_pjs.jpg” picture into an AI video creator and requested it to create TV appearances and an eerie narrative. That might account for the sudden “look” of all this data on-line and the uncanniness of the movies. However if you happen to examine the dates on the YouTube movies, the wiki web page, and every little thing else, the content material pre-dates the 4chan publish, generally by greater than a decade, so these could not have been planted, except somebody was planning this ARG for a lengthy time.
Folks, so far as I do know, cannot monkey with the posting dates on YouTube, Wikipedia, and all over the place else. However what if it wasn’t individuals? I will not waste time on supernatural explanations, however what if a man-made intelligence has already escaped its cage and is attempting to meet its mission of offering historic data, with out concern for whether or not the data is true or not? We all know that querying search engine phrases can change their placement and significance in future outcomes, and we all know AI hallucinates plausible-seeming content material. Would an AI creating Roy Jay—full with footage, a biography, message board posts, and YouTube movies—be that outlandish? Proper now, a pc might be producing and posting uncanny AI movies of unfunny stand-up bits, seeding remark sections with posts by “followers” who aren’t actual, and populating the online with an in depth biography of an individual who by no means existed, whereas erasing all proof of its tampering. And we would by no means know.
The true story of Roy Jay
That is a far-fetched principle. The extra seemingly rationalization is that issues are precisely as they seem. Based on the web, Roy Jay was an actual man with an actual profession in present enterprise. Jay was born Roy Jørgensen in Oslo in 1948. He carried out in bands within the Nineteen Sixties to little success. Within the 70s, he began doing stand-up. Within the early 80s he created his signature “slither, spook” act, and was featured on quite a lot of British comedy reveals, changing into briefly, marginally well-known, till 1984, when he was arrested for indecent publicity after responding to some hecklers by dropping his pants. His profession by no means recovered and he died unknown and unheralded in 2007.
The customers on 4chan had been merely mendacity, and/or making a spooky recreation for themselves once they initially stated they could not discover any details about the comic. Every part we find out about Roy Jay has been rising slowly on-line since there was an “on-line,” together with his few nostalgic followers importing movies and commenting on them. We would have seen it had we seemed, if we had recognized who the man was within the first place.
What do you assume to this point?
Roy Jay: inadvertently forward of his time
Roy Jay’s TV appearances had been restricted to the UK, and they’re solely resurfacing now to a wider viewers as a result of they appear like AI-slop. There have been a variety of unhealthy, semi-obscure performers on British TV by means of the years that we’ll by no means hear of as a result of they are not attention-grabbing. However Jay was simply charismatic sufficient to be memorable (to some individuals). He wrapped lame “pub jokes” in a “performatively bizarre” persona, and it labored nicely sufficient to convey him minor fame for a second. However he additionally, by coincidence, created an act that mirrors the stilted, awkward vitality of AI movies that would not seem for one more 40 or 50 years.
The performances appear synthetic as a result of they had been, however not in a digital sense. Jay was performing a personality that hardly resembles an actual individual. The viewers laughing maniacally is fun monitor; he is most likely enjoying to an empty studio. Add to that the digital artifacts that comes from video encoding on-line (and the makes an attempt to easy stated artifacts) and you find yourself with one thing “actual” that looks like it is faux. (For the file: I believe the true Roy Jay would get a kick out of his new fame.)
That feels true, proper? Case closed? However how can we know? Now that we have primarily offloaded our cultural reminiscence onto the cloud, how can we inform if something we did not straight expertise actually occurred? Are the dates on some YouTube movies sufficient proof for you? Are the feedback on boards that appear to be from actual individuals sufficient proof? What do you do with the obscure feeling that it simply is not proper?
The unreliability of the cultural unconscious
Keep in mind when Hannibal Burress referred to as Invoice Cosby a rapist in 2014, and all of us stated, “Wait, Invoice Cosby is a rapist?” and seemed up the very public and extensively coated allegations made in opposition to him in 2000? For 14 years, Cosby was not a rapist. Then he was, though no information had modified. What did you study in regards to the Spanish flu in historical past class? I did not study a lot—perhaps a paragraph on the finish of the chapter about World Warfare I—however since Covid, I’ve realized that over 50 million individuals died of the illness. And this occurred whereas my grandmother was alive.
In the end, whether or not Roy Jay is a forgotten comic or an AI phantom does not matter as a lot as our incapacity to inform the distinction.The membrane between what everyone knows to be true and synthetic cultural reminiscence has by no means been thick, but it surely’s getting thinner day-after-day, and we’re not answerable for it anymore. Historians are not in command of what will get written down—machines are. Algorithms curate our previous and synthetic intelligence generates our current. And if we will not belief our collective reminiscence a couple of minor British comic, what else may we be flawed about?
