AI Now Scraping Signatures As Well As Cartoonists’ Styles
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AI has taken another step in stealing from cartoonists, it is adding signatures to the fraudulent fakery.
Andrew Deck for NiemanLab investigates.
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
“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,” [Brendan] 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.”
Deck goes deep into the ever more egregious actions by ChatGPT talking to New Yorker cartoonists and checking the contracts The New Yorker signs with the cartoonists and the one they signed with OpenAI in 2024.
above: AI signature; below: actual Pat Byrnes signature
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