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ChatGPT can imitate a cartoonist. Now it's signing their name, too
OpenAI's image generator is creating cartoons that include signatures from real-world New Yorker artists, potentially causing deceptive attribution.
What: Multiple New Yorker cartoonists, including Brendan Loper and Emily Flake, reported that ChatGPT generated images containing recognizable imitations of their signatures. Despite OpenAI adding safety warnings for style-specific prompts, signed outputs continue to appear.
Why it matters: The inclusion of specific signatures marks a transition from general style imitation to the automated forgery of artists' personal brands, intensifying copyright and ethical legal friction.
Deep dive
- Artists found that ChatGPT can produce images that mimic their unique artistic style and include a synthetic version of their signature.
- The issue highlights the difficulty of enforcing 'style' restrictions when models can generate variations of existing signatures.
- OpenAI has attempted to implement keyword-based filtering, but it is currently ineffective at stopping all instances of signed outputs.
Original article
ChatGPT has generated cartoons containing signatures associated with more than 15 New Yorker contributors, potentially making AI-generated work appear to have been created by real artists. Cartoonists including Brendan Loper and Emily Flake have encountered images bearing recognizable versions of their names despite having no involvement in creating them. OpenAI has introduced warnings for some New Yorker-style requests, but signed outputs have reportedly continued to appear, raising concerns that style imitation can cross into false attribution.
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