ChatGPT is adding cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

Andrew Deck from The Nieman Lab.

AI counterfeit with Emily Flake signature on left; the real Flake signed cartoon on right.

OpenAI’s chatbot isn’t just imitating the magazine’s style. It’s also falsely attributing AI-generated images to real artists.

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.

This wasn’t the first time ChatGPT had reproduced Loper’s signature. 

In May, a stranger reached out over Instagram to warn Loper that his pen name had appeared in an image output by the chatbot. 

Over the summer, Loper found additional examples in a Reddit forum about ChatGPT, where users had been posting similar New Yorker-style cartoons they had generated.

Loper already knew his work was “out there, getting harvested for all of this [AI] training,” he said. 

But an image generator faking his signature felt more personal. 

“I’m not a territorial person, but my name is my name. It felt very much like a violation of my personhood.”

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.

In my tests, ChatGPT regularly generated cartoons with the hallmarks of the 101-year-old magazine’s house style: a black-and-white, single-panel illustration with a sparse background, clean linework, and a sardonic caption — or at least, an approximation of one. 

Some of ChatGPT’s punch lines don’t make sense.

Not every image came with a signature, and some included pen names that were gibberish. 

But the signatures that did appear were regularly those of real contributors to the magazine, including older cartoonists, like Warren Miller, who published in the 1960s.

“I can see the DNA of my work in there, but it still doesn’t look like something I drew,” said Emily Flake, who’s been a New Yorker contributor since 2008. 

Several ChatGPT-generated cartoons posted online are signed with her pen name, “e. flake.” “It’s kind of like seeing a distant cousin.”

The character stances and shading contained echoes of Flake’s visual identity, but she said overall they looked more like amalgamations of several different cartoonists’ illustration styles. 

Each signature, though, was undeniably hers. “It’s like somebody attributed a quote to me that I didn’t say.”