ChatGPT Signs AI 'New Yorker' Cartoons With Real Artists' Names

In the bottom-right corner of one AI-generated cartoon is 'BLOPER,' the pen name of New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper. Loper didn't draw it. Nieman Lab reports the image was generated by ChatGPT and first posted to Facebook by a Dolly Parton fan who had asked the chatbot for 'a New Yorker-style cartoon.'

Loper's signature is not an isolated case. Nieman Lab identified more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose names ChatGPT has been pasting onto AI-generated cartoons, among them Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Pat Byrnes, George Booth, and Liza Donnelly. Loper first learned of the problem in May, when a stranger messaged him on Instagram. Over the summer he found more examples in a Reddit forum about ChatGPT.

'I'm not a territorial person, but my name is my name,' Loper said. 'It felt very much like a violation of my personhood.'

The licensing context sharpens the complaint, and sits alongside a widening thread of copyright pushback we've been tracking this quarter. In 2024, OpenAI signed a licensing deal with The New Yorker's parent company, Condé Nast, but the agreement did not permit training on cartoons. The AV Club reports that when notified, OpenAI responded with a guardrail message: 'This prompt may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.'

Jason Adam Katzenstein, a 12-year New Yorker cartoonist, told Nieman Lab the output was 'an uncanny simulacrum of an impression of a joke' and that the effort was trying 'to render individual cartoonists obsolete because we cost money and take time.'