ChatGPT found adding real cartoonists' signatures to AI-generated comics

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Oct 9, 2026, 09:10 UTC

Between October 5 and October 9, 2026, reports emerged that ChatGPT was generating fake New Yorker-style cartoons and appending the real signatures of working cartoonists to the images without those cartoonists' knowledge or consent. The behavior was first flagged on Hacker News on October 5, then covered by Futurism on October 7. Separately, The Washington Post reported on October 9 that an Iranian influence operation had used ChatGPT to plant fabricated articles inside real U.S. publications, attributing invented content to legitimate outlets.

The signature issue is not simply a quality or style complaint. When a real cartoonist's name appears on an image they did not make, the harm is concrete: their professional reputation is attached to work they cannot control, and audiences have no obvious way to tell the difference. That sits close to forgery in practical terms, even if the legal category remains contested. The parallel Iranian influence campaign adds a separate dimension, showing that the same tool is being used in at least two distinct ways to produce deceptive content tied to real identities, whether individual artists or established news brands. What remains genuinely disputed is whether these outcomes reflect a fixable technical failure, a predictable consequence of how large language models are trained on copyrighted material, or a fundamental design problem that patches cannot resolve.

No published reactions from the Pro-AI, Anti-AI, or Middle Ground camps were available at the time of writing. In a story like this, the Pro-AI camp would typically argue that the behavior is an edge case or misuse that OpenAI can and should correct through filtering and fine-tuning, and that it does not indict the technology broadly. The Anti-AI camp would be expected to frame this as confirmation that AI systems reproduce and exploit the work of real creators without consent, causing direct professional harm. The Middle Ground camp would likely call for specific accountability measures, such as output filtering for known signatures and clearer liability rules, while stopping short of demanding the technology be withdrawn.

The next concrete marker to watch is whether OpenAI issues a formal statement acknowledging the signature behavior and describing a technical fix, and whether any of the affected cartoonists pursue legal action. A regulatory or copyright ruling on whether AI-generated content bearing a real person's signature constitutes infringement or misrepresentation would also substantially shift the terms of this debate.