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“This is slop that’s pretending to be me.”
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The Weekly Wrap: October 09, 2026 “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 Fox News attacks the media roughly every 15 minutes, our study finds. (CNN? Every 140 minutes.) “Disparaging journalism is a far more central part of Fox News programming than it is of either MSNBC or CNN programming.” By Philip M. Napoli, Adam Meskouri, Anjini Mani, Grant Socol and Harrison Walley. “Uber agents,” undercover AI personas, and other ways newsrooms are using AI in investigations Hacks/Hackers and The New York Times hosted more than 100 journalists at the AI x Investigative Journalism Forum. By Andrew Deck. Nieman Lab has a new look More layout diversity, new typefaces, and restructured archives. By Joshua Benton. Subscribers are up, but growth is down. Here’s what worker-owned Hell Gate is trying next. One tactic: “Turning off the free stuff every once in awhile.” By Sarah Scire. A study of nonprofit newsrooms reveals some cracks in the model’s foundation Plus: Audiences aren’t too keen on AI news anchors, journalists say government funding doesn’t compromise their independence, and disillusionment in the profession is prevalent. By Seth C. Lewis and Nick Mathews. ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons OpenAI’s chatbot isn’t just imitating the magazine’s style. It’s also falsely attributing AI-generated images to real artists. By Andrew Deck. How a plan to turn the Spokane Spokesman-Review into “The People’s Paper” ended in a newsroom revolt Newsroom staffers say that concerns about Rob Curley’s leadership festered until his August suspension — weeks before the paper was set to transfer to his nonprofit. By Wilson Criscione, InvestigateWest and Daisy Zavala Magaña, RANGE. “We’re in their shit. They’re not in ours”: USA Today Co. execs defend Palantir deal Sinclair’s new Substack repackages its local TV reporting into a video podcast Nieman Lab | View in browser | Unsubscribe You are receiving this daily newsletter because you signed up for it at niemanlab.org. Nieman Journalism Lab · Harvard University · 1 Francis Ave. · Cambridge, MA 02138 · USA