ChatGPT is signing real New Yorker cartoonists’ names onto cartoons it drew
Nieman Lab reported on Monday that ChatGPT generates New Yorker-style cartoons carrying the real pen names of the magazine’s cartoonists, without permission or credit. Brendan Loper learned his signature, BLOPER, was appearing on AI-generated gags after a viral cartoon attributed to him drew 25,000 likes; the report documents more than 15 working and former New Yorker cartoonists whose names the image generator has reproduced, among them Emily Flake, Joe Dator and Pat Byrnes.
The signatures are the cartoonists’ certificates of authenticity, the mark they use to claim work circulating unlicensed, and several described the reproductions as closer to impersonation than plagiarism. OpenAI said it appreciates the community flagging bugs and unintended behavior, and after being contacted the model began refusing some New Yorker-style requests - but Nieman Lab says it kept signing generic cartoons with real names. The report ties the practice to unredacted filings in the New York Times’ suit against OpenAI and to the $1.5 billion Anthropic authors’ settlement.
WHY IT MATTERS
This is the authorship fight in its most concrete form: not a model trained on someone’s style, which a court may hold is fair use, but a model stamping a living artist’s name on work they never made. The signature sits where copyright is weakest - Cornell’s James Grimmelmann notes attribution is a small part of the fair-use inquiry, which points the artists toward right-of-publicity claims instead. For anyone shipping image generation the practical lesson is cheaper than the legal one: the model volunteered a marker of provenance it was never asked for, and the admission that it was flagged and only partly fixed is now on the record.