Using Shooglebox to help make sense of Jean Philanthrope and Brigitte Macaron, the viral AI influencers leaving people wondering what's real

October 5 2026

Two quirky French characters with pageboy bobs have gone viral on social media – leaving people wondering whether what they're watching is real and starting a wave of hard-to-identify AI-generated videos.

The accounts – Jean Philanthrope and Brigitte Macaron – are getting hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook, and their posts have had tens of millions of views in just a couple of weeks.

Jean Philanthrope (also referred to as Jean Phil) has a curled moustache, always dressed in a houndstooth suit and tie, and is often seen shadowboxing in his videos, which show him out and about in Paris – eating oysters, having a croissant and coffee or getting ready to eat a pile of burgers.

The characters' striking hair and sharp suits have been compared to Wallace and Gromit character Wendolene and Lord Farquaad from Shrek. The posts weren't flagged as containing AI and they've left people trying to work out if they're real. Comments on Jean Phil's Instagram post above, which has had 37 million views, include Instagram calling him "a vibe".

Other comments:

• "I don’t know how I got here but I like it"

• "The next internet star right here"

• "I love it when ppl remember they can customize their character fr."

• "Please lord PLEASE - let this be a real human."

• "This guy is from an animated show I just can’t prove it"

The videos from Jean Phil and Brigitte Macaron often replicate viral videos like the example above recreating Leah Halton's Praise Jah In The Moonlight lipsync or the current trend for taping a phone to the window of a subway train and filming as you run along the platform – see the viral version from August here and Brigitte Macaron's version here.

This TikTok from tech content creator Carterpcs, who has 7.3m followers, says: "I used to make fun of people that got tricked by AI – 'look at their hands, look at the text in the background. It's easy'. It's not easy any more. We're screwed." And just as people started to figure out that the posts must be AI they were left guessing again as this TikTok showed his transition into character and Jean Phil joined streamer J2hundred on this live stream:

We've been using Shooglebox and its integrated AI tools to look into what's going on, how millions of people feel about the videos and how this cultural moment is shaping their visions of the future.

We collated TikToks and Instagram reels from Jean Phil and Brigitte Macaron in a Shooglebox – you can see it here – and used our AI tools to quickly surface comments and emerging themes.

There are hundreds of posts about the characters on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. We gathered the most interesting posts, and a wealth of opinions about what's going on, in the same Shooglebox and used the AI tools to show video transcripts and comment threads providing more insight and clues to how the videos were made.

It's often the conversations under the posts that provide the most insightful social intelligence brands need to really understand what’s happening ... and to make informed decisions.

Posts like this one on TikTok and this X post say the videos are made by using an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT to create a character sheet with a consistent face, haircut, and outfit, before uploading the character and reference footage to AI content creation tool Higgsfield, which inserts your character into the original clip, using this prompt: “Change the on-screen performer to my reference character. Match their actions and expressions, and retain the scene, shot framing, and camera movement."

So our next step was to look on Higgsfield AI's LinkedIn to see if they're posting anything about it. That's where we found the definitive answer – a post with just a couple of hundred likes and 20 or so comments:

It's prompted people to call it the end of influencers, with influencer marketer Nick Rogers posting on LinkedIn: "With their app – and even a ChatGPT plugin – you can make an influencer from your own face, or entirely from scratch. Completely generated, straight to TikTok in five minutes. Some of the footage is uncanny – humanised versions of famous characters, faces with something slightly off about them. Some of it is straight-up human imitation. Some of it is just plain fever-dream territory. All of it looks bloody GOOD. This is marketed as a way to 'go viral'. Something people have been trying to make a formula out of for years."

It explains why so many similar videos are suddenly popping up – think Brigitte Macaron on a catwalk replicating a viral Kendall Jenner video while wearing Kate Hudson's dress from How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, or a garage forecourt dance replicated by dozens of different AI characters and representations of figures as diverse as Donald Trump and Erling Haaland.

Scroll Deep posted on YouTube to describe how the overnight virality of the Jean Phil videos and memes was used for a meme coin crypto currency scam: "The real intentions became clearer once Jean Philanthrope tweeted a link promoting the official Jean Phil Token, which sparked a lot of conversation that this character has been created purely to promote a cryptocurrency pump and dump scheme."

Although the link remains on Jean Phil's X profile there's no mention of it on any of his videos, which continue to get millions of views even as more people work out that they're made with AI. The Jean Phil and Brigitte Macaron videos are also spawning hundreds of copycat videos with similarly odd-looking characters in realistic situations.

It's all left people wondering how AI will evolve in the future and how much more difficult it will be to spot what's real and what's made with AI. As AI content creator Ty Farrago says: "We've lost the slop wars. Most people are no longer able to tell what is AI generated and what is not. I can confirm that this is 100% true."

SOCIAL EVIDENCE + HUMAN JUDGMENT + LEADING AI: Shooglebox helps PR teams find and follow the evidence that matters in the social content and conversations shaping culture, opinion and reputation – and put human judgment and the leading AI models to work making sense of it. Get in touch.