Dark truth behind mysterious influencer Jean Phil who's exploded all over internet

An 'influencer' called Jean Philanthrope has got the internet wondering what on earth is happening with the snappily-dressed man shadowboxing in Paris.

Videos on the social media account have racked up millions of views, with alone being viewed 35.7 million times.

The same character features in all of them. It's a man wearing a tweed suit or bow tie, with hair that appears aggressively bleached blonde and styled in a bob cut, and a twirly moustache in the same colour as his fair.

He's standing out in a public place, usually by a road junction, or sometimes sitting at a cafe with oysters or a croissant, before standing up and doing some boxing moves in his suit while looking at the camera.

There's a slightly ironic clue to the truth behind the account in the name 'Philanthrope', with the Ancient Greek words 'phil-', meaning love, combined with 'anthropos' which refers to humans or humanity, together meaning a lover of humans or humanity, which is incidentally also where we get 'philanthropist'.

It's an ironic clue because the eccentric-looking character who features in the videos on the Instagram account, eating oysters or standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or a random junction and shadow-boxing, is in fact AI generated.

The videos have racked up millions of views (Instagram/jean_philanthrope)

The character is linked to a meme coin, a form of cryptocurrency, and some are now speculating that the distinctive, highly meme-able character was in fact created as a marketing ploy for the cryptocurrency, Dexerto reports.

Meme coins are a cryptocurrency which is based around an instantly recognisable character which draws in attention on social media.

As the character and cryptocurrency draws attention, the idea is that the price then rises with this, though this kind of cryptocurrency is often very unstable.

A well known example of a meme coin is Dogecoin, which was originally created as a joke and has become very widely known.

The Jean Philanthrope character has certainly drawn attention, with the character also appearing in hundreds of other videos as other accounts generate videos.

A similar character called Archibald Brown, who appears to be intended as an English rival the first character, has also appeared on Instagram as well, with the videos taking on a similar format of him shadowboxing in public locations.

The character appears in several scenarios, before shadowboxing (Instagram/jean_philanthrope)

Many people took to the comment section on social media, comparing the character to Lord Farquaad from Shrek or characters from Wallace and Gromit due the appearance of the character's hair, while many others also pointed out that the videos are AI generated.

"I think this is an Ai guy", one person wrote, while another replied: "dude, it sucks this guy is literally 100% AI".

Someone else shared their frustration at realising the character is AI generated, writing: "Unfollow, I just realized that your AI. It makes me so depressed. I can’t believe that I was bamboozled."

"I was so disappointed to find out this was AI," another person replied. "I never get tricked by AI. I was tricked by AI."

Some seemed to think that the videos are real, with one replying: "Please lord PLEASE - let this be a real human."