ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

dormento

The copyright washing machine strikes again.

skybrian

Whatever the original intention, this is clearly a bug and should be fixed. But should ChatGPT sign its cartoons with its own name or leave them unsigned?

zzzeek

I follow anti-LLM discourse quite a lot, and across the main bulletpoints: energy/carbon emissions, content worker harm, job displacement, deskilling, mental health effects, and copyright/plagiarism, the plagiarism one seems to have the most attention, and it's also the most solvable, if there were only more serious effort on ethically sourced models that can actually do the real science / math / code work that is what LLMs are best at. The whole world of LLMs to create videos/books/art/literature is where most of the offense is (the video/imagery side of it is where most of the energy/carbon emissions problems are too. and content worker harm). I really wish there'd be a split among these disciplines (science/math/code vs. videos/art/literature) - one is vastly more problematic than the other.

dyauspitr

Makes sense. Pretty much every example it is trained on has a signature.

gwern

This has been a perennial problem with my own generated comics with both Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT (all generations). I often have to put in an extra edit to erase the false signature. It is annoying and I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.

WD-42

Engineering manager at my company put a comic at the end of our sprint demo that was signed bloper. Except it wasn’t funny at all, and kind of weird. I asked him, sure enough it was ChatGPT and he didn’t notice the signature.

ThrowawayR2

Nice. This demolishes the "LLMs can reason" (but not enough to avoid this sort of basic error) and "humans make mistakes too" (not like this) talking points from the LLM promoters.

pollefeys

signatures in, signatures out

baubino

> “It’s like somebody attributed a quote to me that I didn’t say.” > Katzenstein considers the reproduction of his signature by ChatGPT to be more than just a violation of intellectual property; to him, it’s closer to false impersonation. “[ChatGPT] is attaching my name to work that I do not endorse or like. It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me.” > “I’ve had people hack my credit card,” said Joe Dator, a New Yorker contributor for the past 20 years. “That feels like less of a violation than this. When they hacked my credit card, they didn’t dress up like me.” So this has morphed from plagiarism and copyright infringement (bad) to impersonation (also bad, arguably worse, and maybe more provable in court). It’s chilling to think of the implications of having one’s signature attached to a document or to words that are not one’s own.

parineum

This is a pretty solid argument against people who argue that LLMs are more than just (very massive) next token predictors. If there was any thought or underlying thought going on here not putting a signature (at least a real one) would be the right move, despite it being less likely. It would realize, while generating the pixels that eventually became a signature, that it shouldn't do that.

MarkusQ

Plagiarism as a Service. We can all try really hard to pretend that's not the business model, but that's totally the business model.

nyorai

It seems like all the criticisms of Gen AI and LLM seems to concentrate on OpenAI and their products over products from anthropic and others. I am pretty sure that this faking of signature can be done by Gemini, claude as easily as chatgpt.

cm2012

Not putting signatures in art unless otherwise requested should become a default in AI instances.

Insimwytim

The problem is not that ChatGPT is doing that, the problem is that it's not being sued into oblivion after.

userbinator

I've seen photorealistic generations add (distorted but still somewhat recognisable) watermarks too, because that's what the training data had. Everything is a derivative work, and always has been. AI is just making that salient fact so much more visible, and now everyone who believes in the delusion of Imaginary Property is scared at that truth revealing itself. Incidentally, this is also what young humans learning to draw will do. They start by copying what they've seen.

jameson

I'm certain if I drew a cartoon and used the signature that looks just like a real cartoonists', I would get sued and liable for the damage. The same should apply to LLM vendors.

moralestapia

Let's see the prompts, without that this discussion is meaningless.

anygivnthursday

This reminds me my early attempts to use GitHub Copilot when it just straight added some guy's name in a javadoc copyright note in the code it generated.

sergiotapia

This is why I laugh when the companies cry about model distillation "attacks".

Pxtl

Hey anybody remember what happened to Aaron Swartz?