ChatGPT is signing fake New Yorker cartoons with real cartoonists' signatures

The copyright washing machine strikes again.

That's not a copyright issue, it's a trademark issue.

Whatever the original intention, this is clearly a bug and should be fixed. Real question is whether ChatGPT should sign its cartoons with its own name or leave them unsigned.

No one should be allowed to claim they drew something when they didn't draw any part of it, and an LLM isn't a person. We don't credit pens and paintbrushes.

The bug is literally 'it generated the most likely cluster of pixels for the corner of a New Yorker cartoon.' That's the probability of a signature appearing on that style of drawing, not an intent to sign anything.

Why is the signature the line? If the rest of the image is already taken from an artist, why does the scrawl in the corner cross it but the drawing doesn't?

We call it a watermark when a machine signs its work. I wouldn't be surprised if visible AI disclosure is required in a few years. SynthID is invisible, a forged signature is not.

I follow anti-LLM discourse a lot, and across energy, worker harm, deskilling, and plagiarism, plagiarism gets the most attention and is the most solvable if anyone bothered with ethically sourced models. I wish there were a real split between the science, math, and code use and the video, art, and literature use, because one is far more problematic than the other.

Math is close to art, honestly. The art people have no illusions about what these tools do to them. The math people keep hoping their field is pure enough to be fine.

I'd get less grief for using Claude Code at work if it weren't read as endorsing the art side. In my field the build process usually isn't the creative output and there are real productivity gains. I'm also skeptical there's any clean training data left to build an ethical model from.

Models aren't in school, so plagiarism doesn't really apply to them. It applies to whoever ships the output.

You can't separate those disciplines. New tools drive more AI progress, which degrades the art side further. I'm anti-LLM with zero exceptions.

Code is protected by copyright the same as art, and the scrapers took it anyway. Same story with math and science papers.

Makes sense. Pretty much every example it was trained on has a signature in the corner.

This is a perennial problem with my own generated comics, on Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT both. I have to do an extra edit pass to erase the false signature, and I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.

The whole product is designed to be one and done. It services laziness and discourages any scrutiny of the output. The fix would be trivial: a review pass that looks for anything resembling an artist's signature and removes it.

An engineering manager at my company put a ChatGPT comic at the end of our sprint demo, signed bloper. It wasn't funny at all and he never noticed the signature.

Artists should be able to personally sue OpenAI for libel every time it forges a signature.

This demolishes the 'LLMs can reason' talking point, since it can't avoid an error this basic.

You're confusing image generators with LLMs. Nobody claims diffusion models reason. Those are very different systems.

Signatures in, signatures out.