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Editorial cartooning Legal

Clay Jones versus ToonAmerica AI-yi-yi (and some good news)

Published: May 15, 2025 1 minute 8 comments

As reported a couple days ago there are thieves stealing political cartoons, re-imagining them by the use of Artificial Intelligence and then passing them off as their own original creations. Once the practice became public knowledge (thank you Pedro X. Molina) cartoonists and fans began to take action.

From Kevin Kallaugher:

We are rallying support and are mapping a plan of action. Watch this space.

Clay Jones is one of the many cartoonists whose intellectual property was stolen and who took action.

Clay reported the copyright violations and received a response (scroll down):

To refresh your memories, two channels on YouTube (AmeriSatire and ToonAmerica) are posting videos of cartoons that have been copied by Artificial Intelligence, including a few of mine.

I filed two copyright complaints last night with YouTube, and then I went through more videos and found a dozen other copyright thefts.

The response to Clay would set off anyone’s bs alarm:

Good News! YouTube has (See Clay’s note in comments) disabled the ToonAmerica page – at least I’m not seeing the videos anymore. Cartoonists and fans actions of reporting the contemptible actions have had an effect.

Bad News! It’s sister page AmeriSatire remains up and active – at least its prior thefts remain public.

jack Ohman original
AmeriSatire/ToonAmerica theft

For the video dated April 28, at the 2:59 mark is their appropriation of Jack Ohman’s cartoon as one example.

More bad news is that ToonAmerica remains an active presence on Tik Tok.

Bob Englehart original
ToonAmerica theft

At the 1:26 mark of the May 4 Tik Tok video is their AI version of a stolen Bob Engelhart cartoon (above), and at the 2:20 mark of the same video is the wholesale thievery of a Dave Granlund cartoon (below).

Dave Granlund original
ToonAmerica stolen from Granlund

So the pilfering of intellectual property continues. Reporting the copyright violations need to continue.

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Comments 8

  1. Thanks for covering this again, DD.

    YouTube has NOT taken down ToonAmerica. ToonAmerica itself removed all the videos. Why? ToonAmerica could not fight the copyright strikes against it, and they had seven days to do so. So they removed their videos, after asking me to remove my strikes and offering me BS proposals. By taking down their own videos, they removed the strikes and saved their channel. But now there’s nothing on it to monetize.

    As we often say tooned.

    1. We need to find out who owns these channels. The actual person, not just the fake company behind which they are hiding.

  2. Thank you, DD for following this story and thank you Clay, Kal & Pedro for your fight.
    The House yesterday stuffed into Trump’s ‘big beautiful budget bill’ language which would prevent any and all levels of government from developing any regulations on AI for TEN YEARS.
    Gee.
    I wonder who would benefit from that?

    1. It wouldn’t prevent plagiarism lawsuits, against the thieves themselves or any websites that, having been warned of the copyright violations, continued to enable them.

  3. Yes, but the complete absence of any controls on AI itself would allow its users to flood the marketplace and make it too difficult to fight each individual case.

    1. No it wouldn’t, unless you imagine a total ban entirely, and even then you’d have to prosecute the individuals who used it anyway. I agree that clause needs to come out of the budget bill, but not to protect artists from plagiarism. Speed limits don’t stop speeders and laws against bank robbery don’t keep that from happening either.

  4. that “bill” is nothing but a “personal bill” for big orange vegetable and his high command. and “personal bills” are against the Constitution. But so what?? it’s not the 1st time BOV has ignored the Constitution. And it will not be the last.

  5. going by “The Terminator” time line we are just about ready for skynet to come on line. AI is a key element.

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