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“This is slop that’s pretending to be me.”
We celebrated our redesign this week with an art-heavy story that’s also about art.
ChatGPT is generating New Yorker–style cartoons and attaching real cartoonists’ signatures to them, Andrew reported this week. The problem is widespread: In all, he documented “more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures have been used by OpenAI’s image generator without permission or compensation.”
The New Yorker cartoonists Andrew spoke with also gave great quotes, which tracks since their job is to condense a funny idea into a single panel.
“It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me,” Jason Adam Katzenstein said. Emily Flake described the AI-generated cartoons with her signature on them as “kind of like seeing a distant cousin.”
We also commissioned New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper, whose Instagram bio is “old fashioned slop machine,” to illustrate the piece with a human-generated cartoon. Read it here.
— Laura Hazard Owen
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