ChatGPT is signing fake New Yorker cartoons with real artists' names

According to Nieman Lab, when ChatGPT generates images styled after The New Yorker's cartoons, it attaches the signatures of real cartoonists. The result is drawings the artists never created, yet which appear to carry their authorship.

The issue goes beyond mimicking a recognizable house style. A genuine name and signature turn a machine-made pastiche into something that can easily pass for the authentic work of a specific person. For a cartoonist, that means images they had no part in can circulate online under their name, attributed to them and seemingly their responsibility.

The story touches a long-running debate over the data generative models are trained on and how they reproduce copyrighted and stylistically identifiable work. The fake signature pushes the question to its limit: the model does not merely imitate a manner, it assigns the output someone else's authorship.

The piece drew notable attention: on Hacker News it gathered 309 points and more than two hundred comments — a sign that the boundaries between inspiration, imitation, and forgery in the age of AI remain a sore subject.

Source: Hacker News