ChatGPT is signing fake New Yorker cartoons with real cartoonists' names

Through a cartoon that went viral.

After Dolly Parton and Tim Curry died in late August, a cartoon spread online showing Parton, in a sparkling gown, arm in arm with Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter at heaven's gates. "I knew I chose the right plus one," Parton tells God. One tweet of it got 25,000 likes, and versions circulated on Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky, Nieman Lab reports.

In the corner was the signature "BLOPER," the pen name of New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper. But Loper didn't draw it. It was generated by ChatGPT and first posted by a Dolly Parton fan on Facebook, who said she had simply asked for "a New Yorker-style cartoon."

"I had people writing to me about this cartoon, asking if it was mine," Loper told Nieman Lab. "It was very surreal."

Not the first time: in May, a stranger warned Loper that his pen name had appeared in a ChatGPT image. Over the summer, he found more examples on a Reddit forum where users posted New Yorker-style cartoons they'd generated.

Many of the magazine's best-known names, according to Nieman Lab.

Found online: dozens of ChatGPT images carried the signatures of contributors including Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Joe Dator, Pat Byrnes, Peter Vey and Jason Adam Katzenstein.

In Nieman Lab's own tests: ChatGPT produced cartoons signed with the names of George Booth, Liza Donnelly, Ellis Rosen and Saul Steinberg, and even Warren Miller, who published in the 1960s.

In all, Nieman Lab documented more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures were used.

The details are uncanny: Pat Byrnes has always signed "P.Byrnes" with a period at the end. Across more than a dozen ChatGPT cartoons signed with his name, every one ended with a period, Nieman Lab reports.

For cartoonists, a signature is a certificate of authenticity.

"If I put my name on it, it's official, it's mine. It really is a brand. It's the mark that I made," Loper said. Cartoons are often stripped from their original context and shared online without licensing, so signatures act like a watermark tying a drawing to its creator, Nieman Lab explains.

The cartoonists say a forged signature feels worse than a copied style.

• Brendan Loper: "I'm not a territorial person, but my name is my name. It felt very much like a violation of my personhood."
• Emily Flake: "I can see the DNA of my work in there, but it still doesn't look like something I drew. It's kind of like seeing a distant cousin."
• Jason Adam Katzenstein: "It's slop, and unlike the other slop that I've encountered, this is slop that's pretending to be me."
• Joe Dator: "I've had people hack my credit card. That feels like less of a violation than this. When they hacked my credit card, they didn't dress up like me."

"We believe the future of creativity is one that is fundamentally human, and our focus is on building tools that empower human creativity and creators," an OpenAI spokesperson told Nieman Lab. "We very much appreciate the community flagging bugs and unintended behavior by our models, so we can address them."

A partial fix: after Nieman Lab notified OpenAI, ChatGPT began showing a new message for New Yorker-style requests: "This prompt may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content." But as of publication, it still signed some generic cartoons with real New Yorker cartoonists' names.

Unanswered: OpenAI declined to answer questions about how its models may have learned the signatures from The New Yorker's archives. Not every ChatGPT cartoon came with a signature, and some included gibberish pen names, but the signatures that did appear were regularly those of real contributors, Nieman Lab found.

No, according to the magazine.

The OpenAI deal: in 2024, Condé Nast, The New Yorker's parent company, signed a multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI covering much of its content. The terms aren't public.

But not cartoons: a New Yorker spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Condé Nast has never granted any AI developer permission to train models on its cartoons. Reproducing The New Yorker's logo, which some ChatGPT cartoons did, isn't allowed under any AI deal either.

Cartoonists own their work: New Yorker cartoonists are freelancers who keep their copyright. The contracts Nieman Lab reviewed don't permit licensing for AI training.

Possibly scraped: Nieman Lab suggests the signatures may have been scraped from the internet, noting court documents from the New York Times v. OpenAI case that describe OpenAI circumventing publishers' paywalls while developing ChatGPT.

The law hasn't caught up, experts say.

Copyright is tricky: a signature "is an indication of authenticity, but attribution is a very small part of the fair use inquiry," Cornell Law School professor James Grimmelmann told Nieman Lab. ChatGPT usually isn't copying a specific cartoon but mimicking a general style, which makes a copyright case harder.

Right of publicity: Grimmelmann said the cartoonists might have grounds for a "right of publicity" claim, a state-level law protecting people from unauthorized use of their name or identity. That would require proof the cartoons were used for a commercial purpose. Nieman Lab found no evidence they're being sold.

Other cases: cartoonists and illustrators have sued AI image companies before. A class action against Stability AI, DeviantArt and Midjourney has been working its way through the courts since 2023, but its filing doesn't mention signatures, Nieman Lab notes.

There are signs it's starting, according to Nieman Lab.

The Baltimore Sun: last year, the paper fired Kevin Kallaugher, a Pulitzer finalist who had drawn its editorial cartoons for more than 30 years. This year, it began regularly publishing AI-generated cartoons. OpenAI's own watermark tool shows they were made with OpenAI's products.

Cartoonists push back: the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists condemned "the use of AI for its theft from artists" in an open letter last month.

Livelihoods at stake: none of the New Yorker contributors Nieman Lab spoke to can live on magazine commissions alone. A New Yorker cartoon is a calling card that leads to commercial and book work, and that's the work most threatened by AI, they said.

• Be skeptical of signatures: a cartoon with a famous artist's name on it may have been made by ChatGPT.
• If you generate cartoons: don't share AI images with a real artist's signature as if they're genuine.
• For artists: the case shows how AI can go beyond copying a style to impersonating a creator, a gap the law hasn't settled.