Nieman Lab: ChatGPT images carry real New Yorker cartoonists’ signatures
Including Brendan Loper’s ‘BLOPER’
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
In early October 2026 Nieman Lab reported that ChatGPT’s image generator puts the signatures or pen names of real New Yorker cartoonists on “New Yorker-style” cartoons.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 8 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra160 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.599 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash190 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7129 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 99 days before it.
Key facts
- Trigger: a ChatGPT image made for a Dolly Parton fan who asked for ‘a New Yorker-style cartoon’ carried ‘BLOPER’, the pen name of New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper, and spread on Facebook (Nieman Lab via AI Weekly/YourStory; Futurism, Oct 7)
- Scale: Nieman Lab found ChatGPT-generated images with the signatures of more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists (named: Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Joe Dator, Pat Byrnes, Liza Donnelly; Futurism also lists Peter Vey and Jason Adam Katzenstein). A forged Loper signature had also been reported in May 2026
- Loper: ‘I’m not a territorial person, but my name is my name’; ‘It felt very much like a violation of my personhood’; his signature is ‘the certificate of authenticity’ (Futurism)
- OpenAI’s 2024 licensing deal with Condé Nast did not permit training on cartoons; after being alerted, ChatGPT returned a guardrail message about ‘similarity to third-party content’ for such prompts (per summaries of Nieman Lab). OpenAI gave no public statement in Futurism’s article
What happened
Image models reproduce visual conventions of their training data, including artists’ signatures. Nieman Lab’s investigation showed that ChatGPT does this with the signatures of named, living New Yorker cartoonists, which can make readers believe an AI image is the artist’s work.
Why it matters
It is a concrete case of AI output being attributed to a real person through a forged mark, echoing Getty Images’ claim against Stability AI over reproduced watermarks, and it bears on whether image models trained on licensed or scraped work can avoid reproducing identity markers.
Note: the Nieman Lab original was not located; facts come from Futurism and secondary summaries.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 press
Press
- Futurism: ChatGPT caught putting signatures of real cartoonists on AI-generated comics (Oct 7)futurism.com, press
- AI Weekly: ChatGPT signs AI ‘New Yorker’ cartoons with real artists’ names (Nieman Lab summary)aiweekly.co, press
- YourStory: ChatGPT is putting real artists’ names on AI cartoonsyourstory.com, press
Changes
- Filed (Futurism)