ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
At the pearly gates, Dolly Parton, in a sparkling gown, stands arm in arm with Tim Curry, dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. “I knew I chose the right plus one,” Parton says to God, who is standing at heaven’s reception desk.
That’s the premise of a cartoon that went viral on Twitter in the days after the legendary entertainers’ deaths in late August. One tweet of the cartoon received 25,000 likes, while other versions of the image circulated on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.
In the bottom right corner of the cartoon is the pen name “BLOPER,” the signature of New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper. But Loper didn’t draw the cartoon, or sign it. It was generated by ChatGPT and first posted to Facebook by a Dolly Parton fan. In the comments section of her post, she wrote she had simply asked ChatGPT to make “a New Yorker-style cartoon.”
“I had people writing to me about this cartoon, asking if it was mine,” Loper told me. First came a text from his twin brother, whose friend had seen the AI-generated image. Emails and DMs on social media from strangers followed. “It was very surreal,” he said.
These days, cartoon signatures are more than a byline. In an era where cartoons are regularly stripped from their original context and circulated on blogs and social media without proper licensing, they can also act as a watermark that ties an illustration to its original creator.
“The signature for me is the certificate of authenticity. I only put it on work that I’m putting on the internet that I feel needs to be recognized as from my hand,” Loper told me. “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 isn’t the only New Yorker cartoonist whose signature has been reproduced by ChatGPT. In the same online forums are dozens of images with those of other prominent contributors, including Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Joe Dator, Pat Byrnes, Peter Vey, and Jason Adam Katzenstein. In my own tests, ChatGPT output cartoons with signatures of some of the magazine’s most established cartoonists, past and present, including George Booth, Liza Donnelly, Ellis Rosen, and Saul Steinberg. In all, I documented more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures have been used by OpenAI’s image generator without permission or compensation.
“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,” said a spokesperson for OpenAI in a statement. “We very much appreciate the community flagging bugs and unintended behavior by our models, so we can address them.”
After I notified OpenAI of the issue, ChatGPT began to output a new message when I asked it to generate New Yorker-style cartoons: “This prompt may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.” Still, as of the publication of this story, it continues to sign some of the generic cartoons it generates with the names of real New Yorker cartoonists.
OpenAI declined to answer my questions about how its models might have ingested signatures from The New Yorker’s archives during the training process.
Even if Condé Nast did want to license cartoons to OpenAI, The New Yorker’s standard cartoonist contract leaves little room for it. The magazine’s two cartoon editors work with a roster of freelancers who submit their work on spec and only get paid if a cartoon is selected for publication. I reviewed several templatized contracts for New Yorker contributing cartoonists, none of which permit licensing for AI training purposes. While The New Yorker has the right to publish commissioned cartoons first, it is not a “work for hire” arrangement and the cartoonist retains ownership of their copyright.
So how did OpenAI’s models learn those signatures? It’s possible they were scraped from the internet. Court documents released last month in the ongoing New York Times v. OpenAI lawsuit reveal the extent to which OpenAI knowingly circumvented publishers’ paywalls while developing ChatGPT. Unredacted Microsoft memos described ChatGPT as a “product that destroys its supply chain” and the data scraped to train its underlying LLMs as “the largest theft of labor in human history.”
In another memo, Jack Clark, then the policy director of OpenAI, wrote, “[O]ur work on AI and Creativity is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.” (Clark went on to co-found Anthropic.)
Many of the cartoonists I spoke to for this story echoed Clark’s sentiment.
“It’s an uncanny simulacrum of an impression of a joke,” said Jason Adam Katzenstein, who has been publishing cartoons in The New Yorker since 2014. “But it’s not the point for it to actually be funny or good. The point is that it’s trying to deal a death blow to labor. It’s trying to render individual cartoonists obsolete because we cost money and take time.”
Katzenstein was part of the class action lawsuit filed against Anthropic in 2024 by members of the Authors Guild, the largest professional organization for published writers in the United States. Katzenstein’s cartoons had been used in an anthology published by Harper Collins, which was pirated and used by Anthropic to train its Claude models.
Last year, a judge ruled that training Claude on the authors’ work was fair use, but that Anthropic’s decision to download and maintain copies of the pirated books was a form of mass copyright infringement. In July, a federal court approved a settlement in the case, granting a $1.5 billion payout to authors and publishers — the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law.
Katzenstein considers the reproduction of his signature by ChatGPT to be more than just a violation of intellectual property; to him, it’s closer to false impersonation. “[ChatGPT] is attaching my name to work that I do not endorse or like. It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me.”
Several cartoonists I spoke to also differentiated ChatGPT’s ability to mimic their illustration style from the reproduction of their signature.
“I’ve had people hack my credit card,” said Joe Dator, a New Yorker contributor for the past 20 years. “That feels like less of a violation than this. When they hacked my credit card, they didn’t dress up like me.”
Alternatively, Grimmelmann says New Yorker cartoonists could have grounds for a “right of publicity” case, a body of state-based law that protects individuals from the unauthorized use of their name or identity. For that, there would need to be proof that the AI-generated cartoons were used for a commercial purpose, not just as a joke or gag.
While I found no evidence that these AI-generated cartoons are being bought or sold, there are signs that image generators are already displacing the work of professional cartoonists.
Last year, The Baltimore Sun fired Kevin Kallaugher, a Pulitzer finalist who had published editorial cartoons in the paper for more than 30 years. And earlier this year, the Sun began regularly publishing AI-generated cartoons in its opinions section. A quick check with OpenAI’s watermark identification tool shows the illustrations were created with OpenAI’s products.
“[We] condemn the use of AI for its theft from artists, its misuse of our planet’s resources, and its threat to original, creative thought,” Marc Murphy, the president of The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, wrote in an open letter published last month. “The Sun is not alone among American newspapers taking this degrading way out.”
The New Yorker hasn’t taken any such turn toward publishing AI-generated cartoons, though none of the contributors I spoke to said they could support themselves solely on their commissions from the magazine. A New Yorker cartoon is a calling card, and work for the publication opens doors to commercial work, book illustrations, and other gigs that together make up a livelihood. It is this work that is most threatened by AI, they said.
In 1998, Pat Byrnes published his first cartoon in The New Yorker under the pen name “P.Byrnes.” He went on to build a decades-long career with that name. Since he first began drawing cartoons as a teenager, he has always signed it with a period at the end.
“It was like signing a letter,” he said. “Here’s my statement — my gift to you to accept or reject.”
Across the more than a dozen ChatGPT cartoons I found signed with Byrnes’ name, every one ended with a period.